What is the Hungarian origin/meaning of the name "Personey"?

I think the name was originally pronounced Par-shone-lee or Par-jone-lee. I have no idea what the spelling was. But an ancestor from Hungary came over and changed to name or it was changed for him.





What does it mean? Where in Hungary did it come from?

What is the Hungarian origin/meaning of the name "Personey"?
If it was originally a Hungarian name, it's been pretty thoroughly mangled. The -ee ending, which would be spelled -i or -y in a Hungarian name, suggests a locative byname, which is a byname based on the name of a place. (The suffix means 'from, of'.)





I'm not finding any likely places starting with P-vowel-r-sibilant, but if I assume the 'r' is an American addition, then you're not too far from Pozsonyi, which is pronounced roughly /PO-zho-nyee/, with /o/ like in 'go', /zh/ like the 's' in 'measure', and /ny/ like Spanish n-tilde. Pozsony is the Hungarian name of Bratislava.





Other possibilities: P枚sz枚nyi (from a village in Vas county), Pazonyi (from Ny铆rpazony, a place in Szabolcs-Szatm谩r county near Ny铆regyh谩za), Pereszl茅nyi (from a town in modern-day Slovakia), or maybe Peresznyei (from a place in Vas county).





I think you'll need to dig up some pre-immigration forms of the name to come up with anything more definite.





Sources:


K谩zm茅r Mikl贸s: _R茅gi Magyar csal谩dnevek sz贸t谩ra_. Magyar Nyelvtudom谩nyi T谩rsas谩g, Budapest, 1993.





Kiss Lajos: _F枚ldrajzi nevek etimol贸giai sz贸t谩ra_. Akad茅miai Kiad贸, Budapest, 1997.
Reply:The very few listed in ancestry.com are from either Hungary or Ireland. No meaning or origin other than that is known.