Jekovec

Peter Jekovec (my maternal grandfather) was born in Zgornje Bitnje (parish Kranj - Šmartin). His father, Peter Jekovec (b. 1883), came from Srednja Bela (parish Preddvor) and married Marija Porenta, born in nearby Srednje Bitnje.

Searching along this line, in Srednja Bela, I reached the oldest known ancestor in that locality, who was Martin Jekovec (b. 1806). Here, however, the trace of his parents was lost. Only detailed research of the neighboring parish Šenčur led me to the right path, specifically to the villages Hotemaže and Olševek.

Genealogical treasure: indexed registers

Some time ago I came into contact with genealogist Andraž Debeljak, who did an exceptional job. For the parishes of Šenčur and Cerklje na Gorenjskem, he manually transcribed and indexed entire birth and marriage registers and provided them to me in the form of a clear Excel spreadsheet.

For a genealogist, this is an invaluable tool! Instead of tedious and painful reading of poorly legible old scripts, I was able to incredibly quickly find entire families and connect all descendants with simple searching and filtering in the table. Thanks to his effort, the Jekovec family branch is by far the most researched in my tree, as I managed to trace some ancestors all the way back to before 1600 (which represents as many as 10 generations into the past).

Common ancestor and the mystery of Hungarian genes

As I regularly update and share my findings on public genealogical portals, genealogist Bojan Sajovic contacted me on one of them. He noticed that we probably have the same person in our trees – Peter Sajovic. When we compared our sources and records in detail, we excitedly discovered that it truly is a common ancestor and that Bojan and I are actually eighth cousins.

Bojan has long been deeply dedicated to researching the Sajovic family and has found that they originally come from the area of present-day Hungary (along the Sajo or Šajo river). This discovery solved another puzzle for me: I finally got an explanation for why one of my genetic (DNA) tests showed as much as an 8-percent share of Hungarian genes in the ethnic origin estimate! This is a wonderful example of how paper genealogy and genetic analysis complement each other.

More information about the Sajovic family and their interesting history can be found on Bojan's website: rodovnik.e-sajovici.si.

Meaning of the surname

From the book Leksikon priimkov (Janez Keber, 2021):