Professional Genealogist
Rhonda Maria Copher, PhDR. Maria Copher, PhD, is a professional genealogist and the founder of Hungarian Ancestors, where she helps English-speaking researchers trace their families through Hungarian records. Her specialties include parish and civil registers, surname research, Magyarization-era name changes, and citizenship by descent.
Her work began with a document she could not read: her great-grandmother's birth record, written in Hungarian and Latin. Erzsébet Molnár left the village of Zarkaháza in Vas County in 1913 and crossed to Pennsylvania. Finding the people behind that record, and the village behind the name, became the foundation of everything Maria now teaches.
She holds dual U.S.-Hungarian citizenship and lives in Budapest. Time in front of graduate classrooms shaped how she breaks down difficult material: how to sequence it, scaffold it, and make the unfamiliar feel workable.
Maria writes the Hungarian Ancestors newsletter, hosts the Hungarian Ancestors podcast, and builds reference tools and surname guides grounded in Hungarian onomastic scholarship. She has presented research on Hungarian ancestry at the Federation of East European Family History Societies. Her message to researchers is steady: Hungarian genealogy is not impossible. It is unfamiliar. And unfamiliar problems have solutions, once you know where to look.
Find the village. Find the people.