Past, Present, and Future

 

Who am I? Where did I come from?

What am I experiencing now?

What do I hope for the future?

First things first. Where did I come from?

It's been a 40-year project, finding the answers to that.

No, I wasn't adopted; I knew who my parents were and my grandparents and I was even lucky enough to meet my great-grandparents on both sides. But that amount of information made me wonder: who were their parents?

In the late 1980s, when I was in my teens, I asked my paternal grandma, “Who were our ancestors and where did they come from?” Of course, I knew that that side of the family was Czech, but I wanted more detail. What were their names? Where in Czechoslovakia did they live? When did they come to the U.S.?

She told me, “The records are all behind the Iron Curtain. Many of them were destroyed in the war, so we’ll never know.” I remember feeling so disappointed. 

The war she was referring to was World War II. The Iron Curtain referred to the fact that the Soviet Union (the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or U.S.S.R.) was made up of Russia plus so-called satellite countries, including Czechoslovakia, as it was known then. Traveling behind the Iron Curtain was possible but not easy. And there was no internet.

I took Grandma’s words to heart but decided to do what I could: interview her and her siblings to find out what they knew about their/our ancestors. So over a couple of years and a few trips to Minnesota, I did that and took good notes. It was a way to start, anyway.

From these relatives, I got the names of the ancestors who had come to the U.S., which in most cases were my second great-grandparents. The dates, however, were sketchy.

My dad got interested in the project, and he and I made more trips to Minnesota and visited county courthouses and cemeteries in the southwestern part of the state. Dad’s brother Mike, my uncle, had been interested in this subject for a long time, and he also came along with us. We actually filmed some of the places that we visited.

From this research, we found birth and death dates for those ancestors who lived in Minnesota, where most of the Czech ancestors of our lineage had settled. It was an exciting touchstone, also, to find the actual grave sites for many of them, which we filmed.

Eventually, as I continued with the project, I learned that the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter-Day Saints (“Mormons”) keeps records of births, deaths, marriages, and even ship logs of immigration of everybody, whether you’re Mormon or not. Again, there was no internet in those days, and the records were kept on microfiche. Although there were branch libraries with the microfiche material, including in Sacramento, where I lived, the main holdings were in Salt Lake City.

So, Dad and I traveled to Salt Lake City and spent a couple of days there looking at microfiche. We stayed in a nearby hotel and mostly ate at the library cafeteria (which was excellent, by the way). We were able to find out a few things.

By 1988, the Berlin Wall (metaphorically and literally being the Iron Curtain) had fallen, and then Czechoslovakia underwent the so-called “Velvet Divorce,” in which the Czech Republic separated from Slovakia, and each became its own country. The internet was born, and DNA testing started to become affordable. All of these changes meant that ancestral research became easier and more accessible.

In 2018, I did a DNA test (23andme) and got my mom and dad to do one as well. You might think it wouldn’t be worth it to have each of them do one, as we are so closely genetically related. However, the human genome is huge, and DNA testing can be more precise and focused on the ancient lineages the farther back you can get samples.

My grandmother was long gone by this time, as she had died in 1995. However, her sister, my great-aunt J, was still living. She was in her 90s. Because by then I was living in Mexico, and J was in Minnesota, I asked my first cousin Teresa if she’d help me get a sample from our great-aunt. She agreed, and J agreed to give one, and we got it! Some interesting information came from that sample, which I will write about in another post.

Eventually, I also got a digital program for entering all the information I had on paper. I knew that if I were to die and someone else came across these notebooks, they would most likely be thrown out. I’ve been using MacFamilyTree, and I just upgraded from version 9 to version 10. It is wonderful. More about that later, too.

Once the internet became available and these websites started to exist, I was able to use the following websites to do my research:

• familysearch.org

It is a free site run by the Mormon church. Essentially, it’s a digitization of everything that was once on microfiche. No need to travel anywhere to access the records!

• myheritage.com

This is a subscription-based site. It was useful for finding cousins and collaborating with other people working on the same or related family trees. You can upload your 23andme results to myheritage for free or for a minimal charge.

• ancestry.com

This is also a subscription-based site. It’s very user-friendly. I got a lot of information from it. However, you have to be careful with the information because you can easily be led astray unless the information is sourced. For example, one ancestor of my mother’s, a peasant, suddenly “moved” from Wales to Germany and from there was related to all the royalty of Europe. NOPE.

• wikitree.com

This is a free site, and it’s wonderful. The great thing about it is that information is not accepted unless it’s sourced, so the information is pretty reliable. Wikitree’s goal, and it’s an ambitious one, is to reconstruct the entire family tree for all of humanity.

• 23andme.com

This is the company that supplied the saliva-based genetic tests for my family and me. There is also ancestral information on the site, which is useful for constructing family trees.

I have accounts with all of the above, as well as some others, and for the websites with a subscription model, I paid for premium subscriptions for at least a year or more in some cases. Each of these sites has its strengths and weaknesses in terms of what information and holdings they can give you access to. This is why I used all of them; I was eager to learn the depth and breadth of the holdings.

Through this process, I constructed a family tree of my direct lineage and, to some extent, a horizontal tree of cousins. I’ve met some interesting cousins along the way.

As far as direct ancestral lines, I’ve been able to trace my maternal and paternal lines to the mid-1700s and, in some cases, even further. However, the information stops around the mid-1600s. Professional historians can go back further; the records may exist in local regional repositories.

Personally, I’m happy to have gotten back as far as I have; it’s a long way from where the family history left off from Grandma V., and I discovered that at some point, it’s necessary to draw a line and say, “This is as far as I need to expend my energy.”

To verify this, I spent some time yesterday attempting to break through the barrier of the 1600s by investigating what I could from photo images of baptismal registries written in Czech, by hand, from old times. Small regional parishes and civic municipalities in Czechia had photographed and posted them. Little of it had been translated or even indexed. It was slow-going and painstaking, and there wasn’t anything I could find earlier than 1760 or so.

So, for now, I’m declaring this project to be completed. Maybe there will be breakthroughs in the availability of records before 1700; if so, I'll pick up the thread again. 

I can hardly believe that a project I’ve been working on for almost forty years is actually done. The difficulty is that there isn’t anybody to celebrate with about this except myself. Almost everyone I interviewed back then has passed away, including my dad. J, the last sibling of Grandma V. passed recently, a couple of months shy of her 96th birthday. Uncle Mike, though, is still around. I think I’ll give him a call and share the good news. My newly-found cousin will be interested too. She's part of the line that stayed in the Old Country; I plan to travel there and meet her in person, sometime in the not-too-distant future.

The opening image is my dad's fan chart, going back 11 generations.