Back to my roots.

Thea, Rudi, and I spent one of my last days in the Czech Republic visiting some of our very distant (15th century distant) family and visiting the homes of our Czech ancestors. It was such a cool day, something I will always remember and something that very few people ever get to see or do. I am so thankful that my family was able to locate the small villages and even homes that my great, great, grandparents lived in. That is honestly so cool. We visited Soutice, a tiny village with only a few houses, a pub, and a church, Ostrov, another small village, and Rendejov, which has very few houses circling around a well. We have only been able to locate a few of the original houses of my ancestors, as many of them have since been torn down or renumbered. There is one house in Soutice, that looks just as I imagine it would've looked when my great, great, great, grandma would've lived there in the late 1880's. The house is Ostrov, #5, has been remodeled and continuously lived in. Thea told me that most people have summer homes in these small villages and will come to the Czech countryside on weekends to get out of Prague.


House #3 in Soutice. This was the home of Maria Parizek, born in 1845. It is abandoned now and the weeds and bushes are overgrown. Maria Parizek would be my great, great, great-grandmother. Maria was married to Frantisek Studnicka. Studnicka was my grandmother's maiden name.


The house in Soutice.


The village of Soutice.


The village of Soutice.


Thea and I at the house in Soutice.




The small church in Soutice.




After Soutice, we went Rendejov, where a few of our ancestors lived, but we haven't been able to locate the exact houses, as we think they have been renumbered. Rendejov is tiny. There are about 10 houses just in a circle around a well and a very small chapel and that's it. I can't imagine the way that my ancestors lived so so many years ago.







The last stop was Ostrov, where Thea has found the home where Frank Studnicka lived before immigrating to the United States. Thea started a blog when she studied abroad in Olomouc, kept using it throughout all of her travels, and eventually took off and someone contacted her about sharing some similar family history. It turns out that he was right and Thea and Matthias were able to put the rest of the family tree together and see these small villages and find some of the houses too. Seeing all of this history and being able to meet my distant family half way across the world was a once in lifetime thing that hardly anyone gets to experience.


My great, great grandfather's house in Ostrov.


A little piece of my family tree from Bohemia.

After exploring, we returned to Zruc, which is about an hour from Prague, and I got to meet the Rysavy's. Talk about wonderful people. I had heard my mom and sister talk about meeting them, and we are all friends on Facebook, but it was so amazing to finally be able to meet them. We spent the evening getting to know each other, snacking and drinking pivot and vino, and enjoying each other's company. They speak Czech at home so they taught me a little and had lots of laughs at me trying to figure out each word. It was so much fun and they truly are wonderful people. I can't wait to visit them again during my semester in Olomouc. Alena is a dentist so we even talked about me doing a little international job shadowing. It was a wonderful day.

In my last week in the Czech Republic, Thea and I took a trip to Brno, and I did a little more wandering around Prague.


The cathedral in Brno.


The Capuchin crypt in Brno. CREEEEPY


Tiramisu and coffee in Brno.


The Jewish Quarter in Prague. It is one of the only preserved Jewish Quarters in Europe as the Nazi's planned for it to be a museum of an extinct race.


The cemetery in the Jewish Quarter.


Jews with the last name Baum that were killed in WWII. There are numerous walls marked with names in the Jewish Museum.







Each wall contained different Czech towns and the names of those that were killed from each town.


The different concentration camps of WWII.


Jews with the last name Studnicka (the -ova meaning female) that were killed in the War. This woman was from Prague. I was surprised that I saw the name Baum so often, compared to Studnicka.