Preview: genealogy stuff (Patreon)

A New Year's Eve gift. I'll add more to it sometime.

In the summer of 2022, I crashed in the spare bedroom of some friends in Providence, Rhode Island. I was a junior in college, crawling towards my journalism degree. And I was a bit bored shitless, which made me reflect on my past, since that was far more interesting to me than my present.

A few years before, I cut ties with my biological family. Being a trans woman in an abusive conservative Catholic family wasn’t viable, so I opted for a new family that didn’t scream at me or hit me or call me an abomination against God. But getting a new family didn’t cure my interest in my old one. I became deeply curious about my genealogy and how my ancestors paved the way for my life.

It’s not that I articulated any of this in Providence. Commentary always weaves themes into events that you didn’t notice were there at the time. I just became entrenched in genealogical research, and it took over my life for a bit (it held my interest more than the unpaid internship I had at the time). And I made some interesting discoveries: I acquired my great-grandparents’ divorce documents from the state of Utah, and discovered an abusive marriage that nobody in my family had discussed. In a matter of days, I solved the 60-plus-year-mystery of my biological grandfather’s identity (but that’s a story I will never tell). It turned out that my journalistic skills lent themselves handily to genealogy — or rather, I just turned everything I did into journalism.

But the part of my ancestry that most got my attention was by far the ragtag group of Czech immigrants who made their way to the Industrial Midwest in the 1880s. I had grown up in the Virginias, looking at a vintage, slightly worn but well-preserved photo of my family’s store in Cleveland. The sepia photo shows a few people lined up in front of a two-story grocery store and deli. I remember hearing that the top floor was home to the

My second great-grandmother Anastazie Urbanová (née Princová) had left her family in South Bohemia when she was 16 years old, and made her way to Cleveland, Ohio, seemingly alone. And gradually, five of her 12 siblings joined her

Ancestry dot com