Individual Stories of Czech Settlers

Tales of hardship, failures, and success

...When I was 18 months old, my father, who had served out his time in the Austrian Armed Forces, decided to go to America. Later from my parents I learned that we set out from the city of Bremen on a ship with sails. The journey, I think, lasted six weeks. I regret that I can remember nothing of the land of my birth, but I do recall a bit about Chicago, where we lived for six months after coming to the United States. Father had a married sister there. I also remember something of Wisconsin, where we lived for two years and where mother had two sisters. Then we came to Kansas, where the government was still giving new settlers 180 acres of land per head of each family. Because all the better land was taken up by this time, father had to be content with land not so good - rather rocky. Our beginning was arduous; our entire capital being $ 75, for which father had to build a house, buy furniture and necessary equipment for farming....

So starts the life story of Frank Lilak as he wrote it to the Czech paper "Hlasatel"

The "individual stories" pages show the stories of some individual settlers and will link to sub-pages or other web sites with more information about settler families. We will update and extend these pages continuously, so keep checking them for new additions.

If your ancestors came from South Bohemia and you have information about their early settlers' experiences we will be glad to incorporate that into our databases and, if suitable, display or link it on these pages.

THIS PAGE WILL BE UPDATED SOON

Here will come soon:

the story page of the Lilak family of Jilovice, settling in Wilson, KA.
Stories of the early settlers of Oxford Junction, IA.
whatever other nice and interesting stories we can find.

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