Revisiting Bohemia

I'm home sick today (can't be helpful if the nose drips and the voice doesn't work), so I figured I'd search the church books for Martin's birth.  We know he arrived in America in January 1883, claiming Neuhaus, Bohemia as his place of origin.  He must have gone fairly directly to Pierz, where we found him in the 1885 census in Little Falls township (later Agram).  I found him in the Pierz St Joseph church book marrying Mathilda Nelles in 1887.

Evidently, he was born in October, 1859.  I've checked the Jindrichuv Hradec parish books from 1854 thru 1862, with no luck so far, but he could have been born in any village nearby, right?
However, I found the Wanek entries, below......and then tried the Schamers book.

Oh, sure, I got sidetracked, but that only proves that the journey can be as 

useful and interesting as the destination ☺

Once we discover a name to be looked for--like Wanek--well, I can't just pass by without doing a screen capture.  This is 24/25 January, 1856.  Anton Wanek (son of Josef Wanek of #1 Platz Mueller (the mill)) and his wife Marie Schindler had a baby named Josef who, sadly, only lived to February 2, 1856.  I don't recognize Anton's occupation, but they lived at #81.

April 7, 2012 :  Su wrote to say " I've had a lot more practice at reading weird handwriting now and I think [his occupation] is probably 'Greißler'."  

See the word right under ANTON, below?  A Greissler was a general store proprietor.  Schamers was a market town, so there were businesses that would never have been in a village like Oberschlagles.  Anton Wanek lived at the mill and owned a general store. Wow!

THANKS, SU!

 Below is another entry, from September 1859.  Looks like Maria Wanek lived.  But see the tiny numbers written at the bottom?  That may be her death date, 77 years later, in 1936.  There are still mysteries in these pages.  Any idea, Su?

I was enjoying the Schamers books cuz there are twice as many entries on each page as there were in the JH books.  I started earlier (one record book covers 1842 to 1874, so I started near the beginning.  It was a time of less babies born per year, it seemed, and suddenly, I noticed all the little death crosses among the entries.  Oh my, this was 1846, 1847 and the first entries in the revolution year of 1848.  I remember reading that the revolution was preceded by crop failure years and famine, but this illustrates it really graphically.

 

I was struck by the other names I recognize in those books, too.  Some are familiar from the many times we've perused them, but others are familiar from here in central Minnesota.  And, some married a Hesch there in Bohemia, so their names are picked out specifically too.

I found Mathias, Johann and Josef MARZINI and Anton, Josef, Franz and Prokog BINDER, Franz and Martin BLASCHKO;  Johann, Josef and Bartel FIEDLER (so far) and lots of NOVOTNYs.  Kind of amazing that some our families have known each other for centuries!

 Now here's a treat from 1847--see the middle entry there?  The child was Josef BINDER, born to Anton and Anna Binder at #42.  See the notation there on his birth record?    THIS child eventually  became the new Patron Saint of Obsessed South Bohemian Genealogists.  Funny to come back around and re-discover his birth record when we originally found it in 2009.  That's when he became a saint, too ☺

Today and 1848 compared

This is from delancyplace.com this morning.  It makes sense to me, since our ancestors left Europe after the 1848 revolution there:

In today's excerpt - the 2011 uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, and other countries in the Middle East and Africa are instructively similar to a wave of uprising that occurred in 1848 in Europe - beginning in France and quickly spreading throughout the continent. That year turned out to be one of the most pivotal in the history of Europe. It was a time when almost every country was still a monarchy, and even in England, where a constitutional monarchy limited the power of the king, the government was not yet a democracy, and lordships and heredity still held sway. And so across Europe there were violent upheavals as the people, fueled by poverty and stoked by the more rapid communications possible in the wake of the industrial revolution, sought a voice and vote in the governance of their countries. Most of those uprisings fell short of their objectives. But they were harbingers of the demise of monarchy in Europe that came in succeeding generations. Ultimately, the question was not whether monarchy would survive, but rather which form of government would replace it - and the competition was between inchoate forms of democracy and socialism:

"In 1848 a violent storm of revolutions tore through Europe. With an astounding rapidity crowds of working-class radicals and middle-class liberals in Paris, Milan, Venice, Naples, Palermo, Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Krakow and Berlin toppled the old regimes and began the task of forging a new liberal order. Political events so dramatic had not been seen in Europe since the French Revolution Of 1789 - and would not be witnessed again until the revolutions of Eastern and Central Europe in 1989 or perhaps the less far-reaching Bolshevik Revolution Of 1917. ... The brick-built authoritarian edifice that had imposed itself on Europeans for almost two generations folded under the weight of the insurrections. ...
"For the Germans, Italians, Hungarians, Romanians, Poles, Czechs, Croats and Serbs, the year was to be the 'Springtime of Peoples', a chance to assert their own sense of national identity and to gain political recognition. In the cases of the Germans and the Italians, it was an opportunity for national unification under a liberal or even democratic order. Nationalism therefore was one issue that came frothing to the surface of European politics in 1848. While rooted in constitutionalism and civil rights it was a nationalism that ominously made little allowance for the legitimacy of claims of other national groups. In many places, such narrowness of vision led to bitter ethnic conflict which in the end helped to destroy the revolutionary regimes of Central and Eastern Europe. ...
"The revolutions were scarred almost everywhere by a bitter often violent political polarization. Moderates wanted parliamentary government - but not necessarily to enfranchise everyone - and they were challenged by radicals who wanted democracy - frequently combined with dramatic social reform - without delay. ...
"A third issue that came boiling to the surface in 1848 and never left the European political agenda was the 'social question.' The abject misery of both urban and rural people had loomed menacingly in the thirty or so years since the Napoleonic Wars. The poverty was caused by a burgeoning population which was not yet offset by a corresponding growth in the economy. Governments however did little to address the social distress which was taken up as a cause by a relatively new political current - socialism - in 1848. The revolutions therefore thrust the 'social question' firmly and irrevocably into politics. Any subsequent regime, no matter how conservative or authoritarian, ignored it at its peril. In 1848, however, the question of what to do about poverty would prove to be one of the great nemeses of the liberal revolutionary regimes."

Author: Mike Rapport
Title: 1848
Publisher: Basic Books
Date: Copyright 2008 by Mike Rapport
Pages: ix-x