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SS Adolphine outside of Dublin's Customs House, about 1880. The bill posted on the quay is advertising pleasure cruises to Lambay Island. |
As yet, I can only deduce the circumstances of their emigration by reference to broad historical factors. A lot was happening in central Europe at the time. The Holy Roman Empire, of which Prague had once been the center, had recently been dissolved (due in no small part to Napoleon's ambitions), and the Austrian Empire which replaced it had just lost a war with Prussia. The Kingdom of Bohemia (as it was known until 1918) had for centuries been the most advanced and economically prosperous region in central Europe. Education was compulsory through the age of 14, meaning that close to 100% of the population was literate. James and Anna are listed as "illiterate" in 1880 U.S. Census, but we can assume they were literate in Bohemian (aka Czech) and very likely German as well.
The Homestead Act of 1862, the end of the U.S Civil War in 1865, and the easing of travel restrictions in 1867 following the Austro-Prussian War all likely contributed to their decision to emigrate when they did. Economic pressures had been building on both tradesmen and small farmers for decades. Mechanization and industrialization were eliminating jobs and weakening the competitive viability of small farms. James and Anna were likely from the chalupnik or cottager class of small landowners emigrating from the rural south or west, and used one or the other's small inheritance to pay their passage. If James had intended to try his luck at homesteading, Wisconsin was a poor choice. It had been the destination for most Czech immigrants in the previous decade, but by 1869 most of the land had been claimed and was selling at prices they couldn't have afforded. James apparently worked as a day laborer and died in poverty sometime before 1898, when Anna is listed as "widowed" in the Fort Howard City Directory.
Edyth's sister Leonor wrote in her brief family history that her grandparents had divorced, and were buried at different locations -- James in a Protestant, and Anna in a Catholic cemetery. Anna, indeed, is buried in the Allouez Catholic Cemetery beside her youngest son, William, and his wife. But I haven't been able to locate James's headstone in any of the Protestant cemeteries. If they did divorce, religious differences, along with the pressures of adjusting to a new culture, were no doubt contributing causes.
Bohemia had a long tradition of liberalism in matters of faith. Jan Huss was a Czech, and the Hussites led the way for the later Protestant Reformation in northern Europe. Prague's universities produced their share of radicals, and Bohemia's widely literate population was receptive to new ideas. But rural Bohemia was solidly Roman Catholic, a faith tarnished only by the ruling Hapsburgs ruthless reprisals against the Hussites, and the Austrian Empire's repression of efforts in the 18th and 19th centuries to revive the Czech language, culture and national identity. James was likely a Catholic when he left Bohemia, and then later succumbed to anti-Catholic sentiments after having spent some time in America.
Wisconsin and its Czech immigrant community were at the center of the American Freethought movement which, according the Karal D. Bicha in his essay, The Czechs in Wisconsin History, "contributed to the specific and complete departure of many Czech immigrants from their old world faith, a phenomenon which has had no parallel among other immigrant groups." The radicalism, expressed in their Czech-language newspapers and amplified in their fraternal lodges, no doubt appealed to James. My guess is that he wasn't a member of any church, Protestant or Catholic. Rather, I think that he, like many other Czech immigrants struggling to make a life in America, found meaning in the organized fraternalism and ritualized agnosticism of the free thinkers. This would have been something that Anna could not reconcile with her Catholicism.
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