The founder of the family, Voyk, received the eponymous Hunyad Castle (in present-day Hunedoara, Romania) from Sigismund, King of Hungary, in 1409.

John Hunyadi, a military commander, became the first member of the family to acquire the status of "true baron of the realm".

John Hunyadi's fame and fortune led to the election of his son, Matthias Corvinus, as King of Hungary in 1458.

[6] Voyk's son, John Hunyadi, bore the nickname "Olah", meaning "Vlach", in his youth, which implied that he was of Romanian stock.

[2][3] The court historian of Voyk's grandson King Matthias Corvinus, Antonio Bonfini, explicitly stated that John had been "born to a Vlach father".

[11][12] Jan Długosz described John Hunyadi as "a man of unknown origin",[13] and he is likewise mentioned as "a Vlach by birth, not highly born"[14] by Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini.

[11][12] On the other hand, Johannes de Thurocz said that John Hunyadi "was descended from a noble and renowned race of Wallachia".

[16][17] According to one of these stories, recorded in detail by the 16th-century historian Gáspár Heltai, John Hunyadi was the illegitimate son of King Sigismund with a woman named Elizabeth, who was the daughter of a "rich boyar"[18] from Morzsina in Hunyad County.

[16][17] Antonio Bonfini, on the other hand, wrote that John Hunyadi's mother was an unnamed Greek woman who was related to the Byzantine Emperors.

[7][8][19] This story is connected to the Hunyadis' coat-of-arms, which depicts a raven, corvus in Latin, with a golden ring in its beak.

[20][21] Based on this similarity, Zsuzsa Teke and some other historians did not exclude the possibility that the Hunyadis were related to the Basarabs, the ruling dynasty of Wallachia.

[8] The late 15th-century historian Philippe de Commines[23] referred to Voyk's son John as the "White Knight of Wallachia".

[2] In accordance with these sources, Pál Engel, András Kubinyi, and other contemporary historians have written that the Hunyadi family descended from Wallachian boyars (noblemen).

This information will be crucial for possible identification of the remains of King Matthias Corvinus from among the bones stored in the ossuary at Székesfehérvár.

The team of Endre Neparáczki successfully identified the DNA profile of the last two male members of the Hunyadi family by next-generation sequencing technology, and the genetic study was published in Heliyon in 2022.

His son Christopher Corvinus belongs to the rare T2c1+146 mitochondrial haplogroup, his maternal lineage was already present in the Neolithic era on the territory of present-day Hungary but most frequent around the Mediterranean.

The genome of Christopher Corvinus also has a shared drift with a sample from the Croatian Copper Age Vučedol culture, which was received from his mother.

[31][33] Voyk was born in Wallachia, according to the nearly contemporaneous historians Johannes de Thurocz and Gáspár Heltai.

[41] John Hunyadi developed his military skills during his journeys in Italy and Bohemia in Sigismund's entourage in the early 1430s.

[30][40] He and his younger brother (who was his namesake) were jointly appointed Ban of Szörény (present-day Drobeta-Turnu Severin, Romania) in 1439 by Sigismund's successor, King Albert.

[42] The senior John Hunyadi became Voivode of Transylvania and Count of the Székelys in 1441, with responsibility for the defense of the southern borders of Hungary against Ottoman raids.

[44][45] King Ladislaus bestowed the title of Perpetual Count of Beszterce (present-day Bistrița, Romania) upon John Hunyadi after he resigned the governorship in 1452.

[41][46] John Hunyadi had by that time become the richest landowner in the Kingdom of Hungary, holding about 25 fortresses, 30 towns, and more than 1,000 villages.

[50] The ambitious Ladislaus had his father's main opponent, Ulrich II, Count of Celje, captured and murdered on 9 November.

[58][59] Urged by Pope Paul II, Matthias led a crusade against the Czech Hussites and occupied great parts of Moravia and Silesia in 1468.

[62][61] Matthias' reign was also recognized in Lusatia and Silesia, but Bohemia proper remained under the rule of his opponents, Kings George of Poděbrady (till 1471) and Vladislaus II Jagiellon.

[72] Matthias recognized in public that John is his son and granted him the title of Duke of Liptó (present-day Liptov, Slovakia) in 1481.