October 12, 2006
Ancestral memories: UW staffer finds surprises when she digs through her family’s history
How far would you go to learn about your ancestors?
- Would you take a nine-month genealogy class?
- Would you learn a new language?
- Would you take trips to a far off country?
- Would you take classes in the history of that country?
Dena Petersen has done all those things, and she’s still at it, 10 years after her interest was kindled. Petersen, a fiscal specialist in the School of Drama, has found a real-life drama in her own family, one that continues to hold her spellbound.
It all started with her childhood in Nebraska, when she spent considerable time with her mother’s Czech family. “I don’t even remember when I learned to polka,” Petersen said. “And I heard my grandmother and grandfather speaking to each other in Czech.”
Her great-grandparents had come to this country as immigrants and gone directly to Nebraska to farm. They were among a large group of people from what was then called Bohemia who settled in the area, and it was that community among whom Petersen grew up.
“My parents’ families were very different,” she said. “My mother’s Czech family still ate Czech food, practiced Czech customs, told Czech jokes, played Czech music, while my father’s Danish family was totally assimilated. So I grew up very Czech identified.”
But for many years family history was placed on the back burner as Petersen left Nebraska and pursued a busy life, first as a business lawyer and then as a law clerk and bailiff for a judge. Then in 1996, Petersen agreed to help chaperone her niece’s soccer team in Europe, and she decided to take the opportunity to visit the Czech Republic. At the time, she knew only that her grandmother’s birth name had been Simacek, but, in the six months she had to prepare for the trip, she was able to trace her grandmother’s father to a Czech village called Zichovice.
She flew into Prague, then rented a car to drive around the country. “We were only a few kilometers from Zichovice, when suddenly I saw this huge old ruin of a castle on the highway,” Petersen said. “It was amazing. It turns out that my great-grandfather’s village is at the foot of the hill where one of the oldest and biggest fortresses in all of Bohemia is located. It’s called Hrad Rabi, which would translate as the ‘Fortress of the Rabbi.’ It was built sometime before the 1300s, when it was held by the Rozmberk family, which was the most powerful family in Bohemia at the time.”
Petersen’s great-grandfather had never spoken of the castle, or even of the village. Like many immigrants he didn’t want to talk about the old country, telling Petersen’s mother only that he had come from Praha, The Czech name for Prague.
Petersen couldn’t talk with the people she met on her 1996 trip because she knew only about six word of the language learned from her grandfather — “words not always fit for polite company,” she said. But she made her way to the village’s old cemetery, where she found surnames on the markers that she knew to be the surnames of her family.
That was enough. As she puts it, “I had the bit between my teeth and I wasn’t going to stop there.”
In the fall of 1997, Petersen enrolled in the nine-month course in genealogy and family history offered by UW’s Educational Outreach, and by the following year she’d left the law and deliberately scaled back to a part-time job at the University so she would have time to read and do research.
She described the class as very hard work. Participants were taught how to do oral history interviews with relatives, after which they had to search out records that could verify what had been said. They were taught how to find ship records; land ownership records; birth, marriage and death records; and census records. They also collected family photographs and searched out maps from earlier eras. The family histories were then footnoted, and when specific facts couldn’t be found, the students put forward various theories and made arguments for each.
“Our teacher, Sarah Thorsen Little, taught us how to get information when there didn’t appear to be any,” Petersen said. “I felt like we were teasing out the truth from little tiny anomalies. For me, intellectually, it was kind of like Dungeons and Dragons with a human face.”
Petersen came out of the class with a thick notebook containing all the information she’d found and copies of the supporting records. But that was only the beginning. In 1998 she began taking UW classes in the Czech language from Jaroslava Soldanova, who has since become a friend. By 2000, she was back in the Czech Republic, for the first time meeting a man who may be a relative.
The meeting was the result of a blind letter sent to four different people named Simacek in the area of the village through the Czechoslovak Genealogical Society International. Jiri Simacek lives in the village where Petersen’s great grandfather was born. Petersen’s Czech wasn’t yet good enough to converse with Simacek, but they communicated through local college students who knew English. And through an old woman in the village, Petersen thinks she’s solved a mystery she’d uncovered.
Doing research in the archives in Plzen (Pilsen in English), she’d found her great-great-grandfather’s name and his occupation of mlynar, or miller, but above it was written the Czech word for soldier, vojin. This was puzzling because no one in the family knew of him being a soldier. She also learned that her great-grandfather had an older sister who was listed as illegitimate. The old village woman told Petersen that her great-great- grandmother had been a maid for the lord of the manor and that her great-grandfather’s sister was the daughter of the lord, so Petersen surmises that the lord bought her great-great-grandfather’s way out of the army because he agreed to marry the former maid.
That the old woman of the village knew this story despite the passage of 120 years is, to Petersen, a tribute to the strength of oral history. And her own thrill at discovering it keeps her on the trail. She has been back to the Czech Republic three other times, twice to study intensive Czech at universities there. Still, she feels that at this point she’ll have to hire a Czech researcher to read the oldest records, which are written in a difficult script.
Asked why she does it all, Petersen struggled to explain, saying finally that she has some belief in ancestral memory. “When you bring them (your ancestors) alive,” she said, “you not only examine what made them tick; you examine what makes you tick too.”
