Czech Republic

Moravia

August 1996 • In his final years, Dad's big interest was family roots, but all he found were a few books with lists of ship passengers (none were us). Five years after he passed, a distant cousin in Texas came up with the names of the Czech villages where our great-grandparents were born, so I went to Moravia to look for more traces. Within minutes of arriving at the town hall in Ticha, the search was over. A local historian's self-published book had everything in it—names of families who boarded ships to Texas in the late 1800s, their dates of departure, local addresses, photos of their former homes. The historian had also created a museum for the thousands of Texas-Czech descendents who'd been researching their heritage since the collapse of communism. Armed with his book and a guide/driver who spoke some very basic English, I visited three different addresses where Jan and Veronika Mikulenka lived before emigrating on the steamship "America" in 1880. Their final house in Moravia was occupied by an elderly widow who ushered us into her tiny cellar to drink slivovice under the watchful eyes of topless pin-ups that had been taped to the wall by her husband. If I had any doubts about being in the correct ancestral home, they slowly vanished as that sweet old lady poured shot after shot after shot.