Michael Forgon

* Gömörmihályfalva, October 16, 1885 – † Tarnów, October 9, 1914 / genealogist, historian, lawyer ; ; He came from an old noble family. He completed his studies in Dobsina, then in Rozsnyó, at the Lutheran high school. Between 1904 and 1908 he studied law at the University of Budapest. Among others, he was taught by Remig Békefi (1858–1924), a Cistercian monk and historian of education, László Fejérpataky (Eperjes), a historian and director general of the MNM, and Ákos Timon (1850–1925), a legal historian. He obtained his doctorate in law on October 24, 1908, and was subsequently a lawyer in Miskolc, Sátoraljaújhely and Királyhelmec. He passed the bar exam in 1912 and became a member of the Košice Bar Association, and settled in Királyhelmec. In 1914, he was appointed prosecutor's officer in Sátoraljaújhely, but the World War broke out, where he was drafted as a reserve lieutenant and soon sent to the Russian front. He fell as a company commander during the counterattack to retake Przemyśl. He was buried in a mass grave in Tarnów. While still a university student, he began his most important genealogical work, which included a census of the noble families of Gömör–Kis-Hont County. He did thorough work and studied several thousand family documents in the Rimaszombat Museum, the Gömör material of the National Archives of the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest, and the material of the Borsod County archives. He was often accompanied on his research trips by István Terray (1843–1912), a historian and archaeologist (Losonc). He also published advertisements on several occasions to collect data. He used only documented data, and did not rely on family oral memories. Since he expected that he would not return from the war, he entrusted his brother, István Forgon (1875–1959), a railway officer, with writing the history of the Forgon family in his will. He completed this task, but the material was not published in print. The manuscript is in the Hungarian National Archives together with the archives of the Forgon family. ; ; His main work, The Noble Families of Gömör-Kishont County, was first published in 2 volumes in Kolozsvár in 1909. It was reprinted again in the second half of the 1990s (in 1997 and 2001). Mihály Forgon also published historical studies in Genealógiai Füzetek and the Gömör-Kishont journal.