Finding Records in Small town Slovakia

Thought I would share, about finding a German Speaking families in a small town in Slovakia. What was called at the time Austria/Hungary. The Town in German is called Wallendorf. In Slavic it is called Spišské Vlachy.

The family name today is Pohl but within a Latin Catholic Church Records and the "O" being a umlaut the name is Translated as Polar or Pourlak. I was able to uncover the church records (not indexed) going back to the 1500's. What is unusual about the family is they came from Germany or at the time Prussia, in the 1500's and still at the time of immigration to the US were speaking German. The person I was researching for told that his father had gotten a boil or skin growth and his father had taken him across the tracks and visited a Slavic medical woman, In Slavic "klok gubbe". She warped the boil with a cut potato. When the father got home, the wife was very angry and told him never to take the boy there again.

The church they attended Church of the Accentuation of Mary is still a vibrant part of of the town. They still, from what I can tell, have a German Service and a Slavic Service. Both still done in Traditional Latin. I have contacted the priest to find graves for the later children due to the marriage records and death records only going down to 1860's. More to come we hope.