Austria

Agnes was just a little girl when her mother died, leaving her father to find a new wife and travel to the New World in 1903. They left an unknown village in Austria, likely for the sake of starting over in a new place without old memories, and her father Joseph and step-mother Sabina began adding to the family. Agnes was no longer the youngest of her two older brothers — she now had a younger brother and two sisters, though her baby brother did not survive infancy. Sadly, this occurrence was quite common in the early 1900s in urbanized locations considering cramped living conditions and limited access to healthcare. By age 20, Agnes had met our Bohemian-American Rudolph and started my paternal grandmother’s nuclear family.

Now, some confusion seems to exist because their legal union didn’t officially occur until after having four children. Of course, it is quite reasonable to assume that perhaps Rudolph and Agnes married in a Catholic church before realizing that they needed to have legal documentation for the United States of America’s particular laws, but I do wonder why there is such a gap. After having six children, Rudolph and Agnes named their seventh and final child after her mother — but she affectionately became known as “Bunny” to the family. Thus, we finish the lineage that created my biological father, the paternal half of my ancestry.