Sylvia Plath's Hungarian Roots

Sylvia Plath's DNA test results would break the Internet, but we can know right now that on her mother's side Sylvia was part Hungarian. Her maternal great-great grandfather Franziskus Paier or Pajer, pronounced "pyre," was born in Pest in 1822. In Austria he Germanized his name to Franz Bayer ("byer").

Sylvia grew up with her maternal grandmother, "Grammy," whose mother Barbara was Franz Bayer's daughter. Sylvia noted in her diary for 1945 that "Great-Grammy died," so she knew of Barbara, but mentioned her again only in the line "Mother, grandmother, great-grandmother / Reach hag hands to haul me in" ("All the Dead Dears"). Sylvia's chief interest in things Hungarian was a brief acquaintance with a young man named Attila, written up in her journal as exotically attractive.

In case you cannot view the family tree pictured below (click to enlarge), it centers on Franz Bayer, the Hungarian ancestor. Franz's parents were Georg Pajer and Elisabeth Buzar of Pest, Hungary.

Parish records show that Franz's paternal and maternal grandparents were married and baptized children in Pest, so Franz was at least of the third generation. Franz married Vienna-born Josepha Magdalena Schmidt on March 5, 1848, in Vienna. Eight days later a violent revolution erupted exactly there.

Click to enlarge. Tree from FamilySearch.org, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Their daughter Barbara Josefa Bayer, Sylvia's great-grandmother, was 12 and her sister Anna Amalia 7 when they were orphaned in 1866. So it is true that Sylvia's great-grandmother was an orphan, as Plath family lore said. Because the name Barbara Bayer was not changed, Barbara probably was sent to a relative or an orphanage.

None of this was unusual. Men went where there were jobs, changed their names to help assimilate. Life expectancy in Austria was 40, so Vienna had thousands of orphans.

Regarding Sylvia Plath's maternal ancestry, all births, weddings and burials from the 1700s into the 1900s were Roman Catholic, and all births were to married couples. Like the elusive "Native American ancestor" that families in the Americas like to claim, the lone Jew or "gypsy ancestress" in European families is mostly a figment, conjured when it is advantageous to do so, and I think Plath in her poem "Daddy" was doing that.

Barbara Bayer at 18 married Matthias Grunwald in Vienna. Between 1902 and 1908 Matthias and Barbara and their seven grown children all left Vienna for the U.S. and changed the family name to Greenwood.

Through their father, Sylvia and her brother were more Polish than they were Hungarian, and above all their heritage was German and Austrian. Pressured in school to become "all-American," neither Sylvia nor her mother Aurelia mentioned in writing their slender Hungarian root.