This branch of the Austrian Hesch family is descended from Johann Hesch and his wife Marya (Schlinz) Hesch, who came to America from Oberschlagles, Bohemia with three sons: Paul, Mathias, and Anton. +++Johann & Marya settled in Buffalo County, Wisconsin but moved to Pierz, Mn in about 1885. .+++Mathias settled in Waumandee, Wisconsin and moved to Pierz in 1911. +++Anton never married but farmed with his dad in Agram Township, where he died in 1911.+++And Paul, my great grandfather, settled five miles away, in Buckman, Minnesota. He died there in 1900.

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Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Laptop Posting

 I've been reading a book about Waumandee, Wisconsin by LaVerne Rippley, an expat from there. It's "an affectionate portrait" of the beginnings of Waumandee to the present. And, he seems to corroborate most of our assumptions about the immigrants from Bohemia--that they followed each other to the same places in the new world, that they spoke a German dialect peppered with Czech, that they mostly left because of economic hardships and to avoid military service for a ruler they didn't believe in.
Mathias and Agnes show up in the transcripts he did of St Boniface Parish church books...it's so COOL to find children being baptized EXACTLY when we thought they were...lol
Larry and are almost experts now on what other families the Heschs knew back then...who their neighbors were, who they married, where they shopped, even where the farm was.....
G'head...ask us!

(31 days till the reunion!)

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