Activities of Czech Friends

At this moment, our activities are still restricted to fund-raising and facilitating possible joint US-Czech projects or student exchanges.

In the near future, funds allowing, we will become more active in direct heritage conservation of Czech settlers heritage and investigating the American side of the Czech immigrant stories.

Our dream is to one day establish a Homeland experience center on one of the old homestead claims in Kansas. Here, many of the old homestead sections can still be identified, including many of the abandoned first settler's houses and some old school buildings. In addition, the country side is still as close as possible to how the land originally must have looked.

Cold War: US Army Engineers in Europe

The Czech Peasant and Emigration Musuem in Kojakovice, Czech Republic, is now planning a new exhbhtion on the presence of the US Army engineers in Europe during and after the Cold War. Eye-catcher of the exhbition will be a 1973 dump truck doubling as troop carrier. This truck was assigned to the 368th Engineers Battallion and has been stored in US and Nato depots for over 25 years. We are now trying to raise funds for this exhibition and help find information about the truck and the unit it was assigned to.

More information you can find on their page about the exhibition.

Please consider making a donation toward this goal using

Memorial Day 2006, Oxford Junction, Iowa.

Members of our board met in Oxford Junction for the Memorial Day weekend, which coincided with the OJ Museum and Betterment organized Heritage Day celebrations. As for some of the board members, the celebration as a good opportunity for many to visit the old home again.

Memorial Day 2006 - 01 Memorial Day 2006 - 02

Above and below: Memorial Day 2006 in Oxford Junction

Memorial Day 2006 03 Memorial Day 2006 05

The celebration was also used to talk about and fresh up some family genealogy. O.J-ers talked about their families on the cemetery. With the help of a bit of simple crayon and our friends from the Czech Rozmberk Society some long-standing mysteries were solved. The crayon makes inscriptions on the older gravestones readable again and Olga Cerna translated the now visible text. For some, these texts provided completely new information or confirmed old assumptions on the Czech origins of their ancestors.

Cemetery 02 Cemetery 01

Telling the tale of your ancestors using gravestone inscriptions. Crayon helped make the mostly Czech text on the older gravestones readable again (the water-soluble cray disappears without harm at the first rain shower).

US - Czech cooperation

Since 2000, people from Oxford Junction and the Rozmberk Society have been in close contact, finding out shared heritage through the many people that emigrated from the Suchdol - Kojakvoice area in eastern South Bohemia to Oxford Junction, IA. Of the 160 families living in Oxford Junction, more than 100 have one or more Czech ancestors, and of over 50 of them, these ancestors came from within a 20-mile radius of Kojakovice.

Sister city agreement between Oxford Junction and Jilovice

On 2 June 2001, the Kojakovice Museum and Information Center was formally opened. A group of representatives of Oxford Junction were present at the opening. As part of the opening ceremony, a sister city partnership agreement was signed between Oxford Junction and Jilovice (the municipality to which Kojakovice belongs). The agreement was signed by Jilovice mayor Vera Jindrova and Betsy Bonny as -now former - mayor of Oxford Junction. In addition, the agreement was also signed by two youths; Eva Chadtova of Jilovice and Cortney Balicheck of Oxford Junction.

Signing the sister city agreement
Betsy Bonny signing, with Vera Jidrova looking.
Standing center-right Cortney Balichek and far-right Eva Chadtova

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Unless mentioned differently, all pictures are © collection Rozmberk Society, Friends of the Rozmberk Society, or provided under © by individual partners. In some instances, copyright is public domain or could not be established or obtained within reasonable effort.

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