I have since been to my great-grandma's grave in South Dakota, on a scorching hot summer weekend. One Thanksgiving Friday was spent walking two of the ethnic Chicagoland cemeteries. A trip through Wisconsin was detoured in order to visit two cemeteries in a little town. One of the buildings my grandpa first lived at was near Morton East and Central Federal. J. Sterling Morton was the founder of Arbor Day, and J. Sterling Morton High School was named for him. J. Sterling’s son Joy created the salt empire. Central Federal Savings and Loan is part of the Bohemian Wall Street on Cermak Avenue. Anton Cermak was the only foreign born mayor of Chicago. After he was assassinated in 1933, 22nd Street in Chicago and the western suburbs was renamed in his honor.
Shortly after posting the few clues I had accumulated into a genealogy message board, a guy in California with the same last name as my great-grandma's maiden name contacted me. He relayed me to another relative in Chicagoland with the same last name as my great-grandma's. They pronounce their name differently from the way my grandma did, but we're related. Your Bohemian grandma is your Babi, which is pronounced like bubby. Remember Bubby Brister of the Steelers? Before I knew anything about genealogy, I wondered why he was named after his grandma. Your Bohemian grandpa is Dede, pronounced like Du-yed-uh. One of the first characters mentioned in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is a Dede. My mom and uncle had a grandma who was called Babi by everyone in the family. The title was not passed down to my grandma for our generation. Babi died when I was three years old, so I have very few memories of her. She never learned to speak English, maybe that is why I could not understand who she was when we went to visit. Babi was one of the younger of 12 kids, and my two new genealogy cousins were never able to find anything on her in their research until they found me. I knew very little of Babi’s older siblings until I found my genealogy cousins. Now there were three of us from the family doing the searching. My grandma's sister died from pertussis (whooping cough) when she was two. One relative died in the Philippines in WWII. The influenza pandemic of 1918 claimed the life of one family member. The brother of my mom and uncle died of diphtheria. Another relative lost his life at two years old to cholera, in 1906. As far as we can tell, no one in our family died in the Eastland disaster. My great grandpa was a stone mason, my grandpa was a butcher. My mom mentioned more than once that my grandpa came home beat up and bloody when organizing the butchers into a union. There was a time when unions were needed to protect the workers. A few relatives worked in the breweries and at Western Electric. The vacuum tube and loudspeaker were developed by Western Electric, and the Hawthorne Effect was researched at the Hawthorne Works of Western Electric in Cicero. One couple in the family worked at Electro-Motive. EMD was a GM division that was the largest builder of diesel locomotives. After a few more successes, another relative contacted me. Her maiden name was the same as my grandpa's last name, and she was a few years younger than my mom. Her dad lived at the same address my grandpa lived at in the 1920 census. We knew we were related, but it was not until a relative in the old country we found through facebook proved where we had a common ancestor. We recently found a woman in the Cities who is connect through my great-grandpa's little sister. There is a woman in Arizona who came from that small town in Wisconsin where some of our family is buried. Now there are seven of us searching.
