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Vaclav Filipek
Vaclav Filipek (pronounced Vaslov) was born September 10, 1863 at the Filipek Family Farm. He was Anton and Katerina's eighth and last child. When he was born his mother was 30 and his father 48. As the youngest child, Vaclav was the expected heir to the Filipek Family farm. And also as the youngest child, he would have watched the others make their life choices. By the time he was six, his brother Jan left for Minnesota and by the time he was 16, his sisters Anna and Katerina left with their husbands for Minnesota. His father deeply desired to keep the farm in the Filipek name and Vaclav was the logical choice. By the fall of 1881 when Vaclav was eighteen, his older brother Jan had been gone for 12 years and his brother Frantisek, 9 years older, had developed more of an interest in architecture and teaching than farming. Two of his sisters had moved to Minnesota and the other, Mary, had married and owned the farm down the road with her husband Frantisek Palecek. So by the fall of 1881, it was only 18 year old Vaclav and 21 year old Rosalie at home with their parents on the Filipek Farm. Sometime in early 1882 life got complicated for Vaclav. But first, let's jump forward a bit and then we'll go back to early 1882. From his Agronomics Journal, it is known that in the fall of 1884 Vaclav was attending the Hracholuskach School. The reason we know this is that the initial entry in that journal is for September 26, 1884. Hracholuskach is about 20 miles west of Ceske Budejovice and about 40 miles west of Kolence. The Hracholuskach School is a school of farm management and economy. Terry Nelson has Vaclav's journal and has had it cleaned and rebound. The journal is cloth with a hand-stitched binding and the name Vaclav Filipek is embossed on the front. It is filled with pages and pages of beautiful script, probably of Vaclav's farm experiments. The journal's front cover along with sample pages can be seen in the Vaclav Filipek Picture Collection. Unfortunately for us, it is all in Czech, but perhaps someday some of the pages will be translated. It is unknown if the 1884 journal is his only journal or one in a series, but it does place Vaclav in Hracholuskach in the fall of 1884 at the age of twenty-one. While attendance at the Agronomics School suggests that Vaclav was on a path for a formalized agronomics education, other things were whirling around him. At some point in the early 1880s, he met young Katerina Nemec. They had a child and she went to Chicago to have the baby. The baby was born December 13, 1882 and baptized on December 17, 1882 at St. John Nepomucene on the near south side of Chicago. The baby was named John Vaclav Filipek and the Baptismal Record states that the father was Vaclav Filipek and the mother was Katerina Nemec. The baptismal sponsors were Thomas and Theresa Novak. Katerina Nemec Katerina Nemec was born October 20, 1862 in Mazelov at Farm No. 44. She was the daughter of Martin Nemec and Katerina Zelezny. Sometime between 1862 and 1867 the family moved to Ceske Budejovice and then about 1870 to Lomnice. Almost nothing is known of her life in Bohemia, except that it is thought that she attended cooking school in Vienna. Vaclav and Katerina in the Early 1880s So how did Vaclav and Katerina meet? It is possible that they knew each other for years. Kolence a very small town was less than two miles from Lomnice. Given the size of Lomnice it's possible that this is where they both went to the Bohemian equivalent of grade school and high school. Katerina was about a year older than Vaclav, but the town was small and most likely all the families and kids knew one another for years. Vaclav and Katerina must have become serious about each other by the fall of 1881 or spring of 1882. By the spring of 1882 Katerina at age 19 had become pregnant and either she or her family arranged for employment in Chicago with friends or relatives. It seems a little extreme to travel 5000 miles because of an unexpected pregnancy, and the research shows that her father's aunt had three successive children without a marriage and they all lived on the Nemec farm in Mazelov in the early 1800s. In addition her mother, Katerina, was 6 months pregnant with her first child when Martin finally married her. So it’s a little unclear what the issues were. In fact it appears that unwed pregnancies followed by marriage were pretty common in farming communities of the time. So near the end of June 1882, Katerina said goodbye to her parents and boyfriend Vaclav Filipek and began the journey from her parent's home in Lomnice, Bohemia to Chicago, Illinois. She would have taken a small trunk of possessions and traveled via horse and cart to a nearby rail center, probably Ceske Budejovice. Vaclav may have been the one to take her. There she caught the train for Bremen, Germany, where she probably stayed a few days getting acclimated and finding a ship to America. On 5 July 1882, she boarded the Strassburg, which was headed for New York on one of its regular runs. The Stassburg was a decade old steamer about 350 foot long and 40 feet wide. The voyage took 17 days and she arrived in New York on 21 July 1882. Katerina listed herself on the manifest as a servant, which is a way of saying that a family sponsored her to provide help in their home. It appears that she made the voyage without friends or relatives. After arriving in New York Castle Garden, she disembarked and passed through local customs. Getting into the USA in those days was pretty easy. She then needed to exchange her money and take the ferry from lower Manhattan to New Jersey where she boarded a train for Chicago. The trip to Chicago is about 900 miles and took several days. Once in Chicago she needed to make her way with her belongings to an area around 185 W. 24th Place, a Bohemian neighborhood on Chicago's south side. It was about 3-4 miles from the railroad station. The entire journey was about 5000 miles and took a over three weeks. She was 19 years old, 4 months pregnant, and it appears she went by herself. And as long as it was, it was a journey she was to make several times in her life. Some research has been done on who these friends or relatives or sponsors were in Chicago might have been. One possibility is that they are John Filipek's 1882 baptismal sponsors. These sponsors were John and Theresa Novak. Later, Katerina's brother would marry a Mary Novak. In addition, a family that lived next door to the Novaks, the Dedinas also seem connected somehow. However at this time no relationship links between the Nemecs and either family have been established and thus it is possible the Novaks were just friends of the Nemecs who had left for Chicago years earlier. The only information we have on what happened to Vaclav during this period is a quote from Rose Filipek, John Filipek's wife. In a discussion with her in 1977, she said "James ran away Bohemia (Kolenec) so he wouldn't be inducted into the army-about a year after Grandma Katherine". If so, then Katerina sailed to America in the summer of 1882 and Vaclav followed in the summer of 1883. I don't know if there was a war going on, but Bohemia was part of the Austrian Empire and most likely the Austrians tapped all of their provinces for young able-bodied men. In the summer of 1883, Vaclav was 19 going on 20, a prime age for recruitment. The next event we know is that Vaclav and Katerina were married on January 29, 1884. This information which I searched for years was finally found on Katerina's 1914 Passport Application. Unfortunately the location is not stated. Previously I had a requested a decade long search for their marriage record at St. John Nepomucene in Chicago and I also searched the On-line Illinois Marriage Index for all Filipek and Nemec marriages before 1900. Since no marriage was found at St. John Nepomucene or in the On-line Illinois Marriage Index, it would appear that Vaclav and Katerina returned to Bohemia in late 1883 or early 1884 and were married there. Searches are taking place for the marriage record in Mazelov, Kolence, Ceske Budejovice, and Hracholuskach. To add more intrigue to our story, it was recently discovered that in 1883 Anton Filipek transferred the working of the Filipek Family Farm to his daughter Rosalie who had married Jakob Kandl. Rosalie and Jakob were married the same year and perhaps the two events coincided. It is possible that all these events are interrelated. Anton saw his son leave because of the draft. He may or may not have known about the new grandchild, but he already knew that others in the family had left for America like people and perhaps he thought that Vaclav would stay also. So it appears that with the marriage of his last daughter and now almost 70 years old and no one to work the farm, ownership was transferred to Rosalie and her husband Jakob Kandl, who had been married in the same year. Determining whether Vaclav and Katerina were married on January 29, 1884 in Bohemia or the United States would help sort out who was where and whether they both came over or whether they both went back or just one. Based on the Agronomics Journal, we know Vaclav was certainly at the Agronomics School in Hracholuskach in the fall of 1884 completing his studies. But we do not know if Katerina was with him. There are no recollections of his marriage from the Kandl family, all they knew was that Vaclav had decided to leave, that he had planted a grove of cherry trees for his mother, and left for Chicago. Their recollections were also that he had four daughters, but this is not correct. Could Vaclav and Katerina have returned to Bohemia and not told anyone about their child? Or did she return to her parents home in Lomnice and live there with her son John while Vaclav pursued his education at the Agronomics School. Is it possible they were married in the USA and I just haven't found the record yet? The implications are interesting. If they both returned, it suggests their son John returned also and was raised as a boy in Bohemia. It also means that Vaclav intended to be a farmer and was continuing his studies, but the Filipek farm was already transferred to his sister in 1883. Our mystery continues and with time it will sort out, we just need a little luck in finding the marriage certificate and lots more luck in finding the shipping records. Initial Web Publication Date: 02/11/2001 |
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