The first attempt to develop a large collection of recorded speech material in Hungarian was made by the phonetician Lajos Hegedûs in the 1940s. He wanted to preserve the sounding of the various Hungarian dialects in the country and even outside Hungary with the purpose of analyzing, among other things, the intonation, pauses and rhythm of speech in those dialects. This paper introduces the properties of the Hegedûs Archives on the one hand, and discusses the results of investigations that aimed to compare the speaking strategies of people that could be the great-grandparents of the speakers living now, on the other hand.