A few months back, I remembered how my paternal grandmother, born Maria Julia, known simply as Mary, used to make thin pancakes, often with jam, or her delicious homemade jelly, rolled up inside. She called them palatschinke or palačinky — a funny word — which led me to my latest genealogical findings.
I used to think her mom, who went by Julia, was probably from Slovakia. I figured it was pretty much a dead-end branch on the family tree, since Julia died when my grandma was only 11. She never really knew where her mother came from. As adults, Julia's children didn't even seem to be on the same page with regard to her maiden name.
Julia's husband, Jan Łacny AKA John Lancy, hailed from what today is Poland. Their official records have different places of origin listed at different times, shifting as the political winds and European borders (Moravia, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary, Czechoslovakia).
How could I ever find her origins?
The funny pancake name got me thinking. How would my grandma have learned to make them? probably from her mom, or, grandma AKA "Buh-pka" — another geolinguistic clue!
It turns out the way my grandma pronounced the pancakes was closest to Czech; the granny nickname seems to check out for dialects spoken from southeast Poland to Slovakia and beyond.
Could I really pinpoint Julia and her parents? I started digging through old records with the help of my trusty genealogist relatives. For nearly a quarter of a century, I was never sure of the immigration details of Julia and her mother and siblings. I had always searched the surname Mrazek or similar, what my grandmother told me was Julia's maiden name. A lightbulb — the 1910 U.S. Census — Julia's mom was married to Julia's stepdad before they came to America. I had always thought Genevieve (Germanic Genovefa/Genofeva, Jenovéfa in Czech, Genowefa in Polish) "Jennie" remarried once in the USA. I thought she met her second husband, who I presumed was of German origin, considering his name, around Pennsylvania. However, if you look at the 1910 census, it says Jennie and Frank/Fred/Franz/Ferdinand Seidler had been married nine years, which means they would have been married before coming to the USA. (It turns out there had been ethnic Germans in Bohemia for centuries; I guess I missed that day in history class.)
So, Jennie became a Seidler before leaving Europe — no wonder I couldn't find anything promising from Ellis Island under the name Mrazek.
I searched Seidler on Ellis Island, and bingo! Jennie crossed the Atlantic on the SS Kaiser Wilhelm II with four of her children* and a whopping $4. The manifest of alien steerage passengers indicates that Jennie and her children were planning on joining "Husb: Ferdinand Seidler" with a final destination of Uniontown, PA.
Imagine, in mid-September 1903, my great grandmother, Julia, stepped foot on American soil for the first time, at the age of 6, with three of her siblings (the youngest a half), aged 3, 2, and 10 months. She would have had her seventh birthday less than a week after arriving in the New World.
The document from Ellis Island reveals that they had last lived in Bittau or Bielau (now Bítov or Bílov, in today's Czech Republic). Records from the late 1800s to 1900 in those Silesian towns show the F. Seidler family. We were getting somewhere!
To reach the North Sea that summer, Jennie would have trekked more than 500 miles, with a baby, two toddlers, and young Julia in tow. I struggle to get a baby and toddler down two flights of stairs, let alone across half of Europe.
Thanks to some death records and a WWII draft card I discovered on Ancestry from Belton_Remembers (thank you!!!) as well as chats with one of Jan's daughters, I knew I had to find records from Ostrava. Amazingly, a lot of old records from that region of Czechia have been digitized, and one of the archivists at the regional office graciously helped me find them, after someone from the village of Bílov pointed me in that direction.
It turns out that Jenovéfa was born October 7, 1864 to Marianna Vijatka and František Mainda from Ludgeřovice, Czechia. Jennie's first husband, Julia's father, Josef Mrázek, was born in Lhotka, which is today the Mariánské Hory neighborhood of Ostrava, April 21, 1858 to Johanna Otisková and Ignátz Mrázek. Julia was born there too, as Juliana Františka Mrázek, September 21, 1896.
Josef's father, Julia's grandpa, was murdered on the Ides of March 1900, but I'm told there are no written records surrounding his death.
Josef died of tuberculosis on September 26, 1900, just a few days after Julia turned 4; her mom was pregnant with her brother, Anton.
The 1910 census states that Jennie had given birth to 12 children but that only five had survived.
Bupka Jennie died in Washington County, Pennsylvania on April 19, 1929; her two eldest children died the next year: Mary Fonzi (age 30), car accident, one year and three days after her mother died, and Julia, September 1, 1930, a few weeks shy of her 34th birthday, from complications of an appendicitis.
Through all that hardship, somehow, the pancake recipe endured.
