A Few Tattered Shreds, Redux

Back in the early days of this blog I wrote that I had read somewhere memoirs are about what we remember and not necessarily about what actually happened...and I could not accurately remember who said that. I also wrote about one of my favorite writers, John Gierach, and his amusingly believable essay on remembering. He says our recollections are influenced and made up of many variables – mood, surroundings, other people, various levels of self-perception - “and a few tattered shreds of what actually happened.”* This certainly proved true in both Grandma and Grandpa's baptism stories. Grandma always celebrated her birthday on December 29, but her official birthdate, according to the baptismal records was December 28. What was the actual day of her birth? Who knows? Was she born at midnight? Maybe. Overall, this one day discrepancy is probably not a big deal in a culture where name days – the feast day of the saint one was named after - were more likely to be celebrated than birthdays. The bigger deviation from remembered facts, however, is more significant in the names, numbers and birthdates of Grandpa's sisters.

In my mother's memoir of Grandma and Grandpa, Remembering Mama and Papa, she writes of Grandpa's sisters:

Papa was brought up with five sisters. Two other sisters died at birth...Papa had one sister who was younger than him, Katerina...

Mom had written this memoir a number of years after Grandpa had died, so she was writing from memory of Grandpa's memory of his family. He was 92 when he died, and, granted, he was a sharp 92, but his memory was probably less than perfect in remembering the exact ages and order of the sisters that surrounded him growing up, most of whom he had not seen in close to 70 years. In the interest of accurate family history, I will use the baptismal records and Mom's memoir of Grandpa to attempt to make sense of the house full of girls Grandpa grew up with. (Remember, names and spellings are pretty arbitrary in the historical records and family usage.)

Julianna and Maria, twins, were the oldest. Maria died at or soon after birth. Julianna, referred to as Julia, lived into her 80s or 90s.

Theresia was next. According to the memoir, she died of pneumonia or diphtheria as a young married woman leaving behind a despondent husband who killed himself. Their young son was raised by his father's relatives in Vienna.

Then comes Maria, known as Mary. She is the second Maria, and unlike her earlier namesake, she lives to a ripe old age. In her later years she lives in the family home in the Haban section of Moravsky Svaty Jan. She is best know in this blog as the sister whose picture makes it into the book, Hutterite Society.**

Photo of Grandpa's sister, Mary, taken from the book Hutterite Society by J
ohn Hostetler, (1997)

Rosalia dies at birth. This is one of the two infants that is not mentioned in the memoir, and I never heard Grandpa speak of her, though she would have died almost four years before Grandpa was born.

Catharina is referred to in the memoir as the one sister younger than Grandpa. She is, in fact, two years older than he. She was know as Tecinka Katina and was godmother to my mother and two of her sisters. She lost a husband in World War I, remarried, then moved to Sobotiste, the town Grandma grew up in, where she and her new husband ran a grocery store. She died suddenly in her 50s.

Grandpa – Andreas/Andrew – is the seventh child and only boy.

Amalia/Amelia lives for only a month after her birth. She is the other infant that is never mentioned. Grandpa was only two when she died, so would not remember her. Interestingly, my daughter named her second child Amelia, not knowing that it was a family name.

The youngest is Anna, nicknamed Nanina. According to the memoir, Grandpa was closest to her of all his sisters. They wrote each other long letters frequently over the years. She, too, was in her 90s when she died, eight months before Grandpa died. He had outlived all his sisters.

So, that's the updated story of Grandpa and his sisters. It was kind of fun going through what passed for a data base in the late 1800s, searching for those few tattered shreds of what actually happened and finding the names and dates for all those siblings. It was also encouraging to see the historical shreds were slightly more than a few and probably less tattered than they initially appeared.

Julia, Anna and Maria, rocking the best of Haban women's fashions

*See post from June 8, 2018, A Few Tattered Shreds...

**See post from June 22, 2018, Mary, Mary Quite...Haban

In our family histories, the frontier between fact and fiction is vague, especially in the record of events that took place before we were born, or when we were too young to record them accurately; there are few maps to these remote regions, and only the occasional sign to guide the explorer. ― Adam Sisman