Christmas Greetings

If there is anyone out there who still reads this blog, I extend you joyful Christmas greetings and my best wishes for the new year! It's true, I've been rather neglectful of these pages the past weeks, or, as I now look at things, months. I must say, it's been weighing on me a bit lately. Whenever I get a moment or two of down time, I hear a little voice in the back of my mind pestering ever so quietly "write on your blog". I do love writing and sharing bits of my life through this medium, but it's the life, not the medium, that's been the tiring thing of late.

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I returned to God's own land of Michigan late on the evening of December 12th, before much of the wicked winter weather had descended upon the Upper Midwest with much ferocity. I must say, though, that I had begun to miss winter in Washington - a feeling which was exacerbated by the pitiable way in which the region dealt with a mere two inches of snowfall the week before I left. In any event, I am home safe with one semester at the Catholic University of America behind me.

I don't wish to really delve into academics too much (at the risk of boring you, kind reader), but, suffice to say it was a successful semester on both important fronts: the lesser being the grades and the greater being the personal intellectual growth sustained. I must say that I am pleased with my choice to move to Washington and to attend CUA. It has afforded me much in the way of new perspectives and experiences, and I feel as though I am making good connections personally and professionally. But, that's all rather detached-sounding, as if I am writing for a CUA prospectus or something. I'll have thaw my writing fingers a bit more before talking more in depth about people and ideas that have made impressions on me this semester.

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The weekend before Thanksgiving I made my first visit to New York City. I went with a friend who I know from Ball State who currently lives in Washington. We took the Megabus and stayed with a mutual friend who was in the city for the semester on a co-op internship program. We scurried about like good little tourists, attempting and mostly succeeding in seeing the major sites. I was sad that St. Patrick's was almost entirely coated in scaffolding both inside and out, but I was rewarded somewhat by happening upon a mass for the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre. It was the first time I had ever seen the Knights in any formal occasion, and it left quite an impression. I think such groups are good for the Church and for civilization in general. I may be accused for being motivated by nostalgia or mere conservatism, but I think such groups can truly raise the mind to the chivalric virtues they strive toward. Modern culture is wimpy. The knights of anything are inherently vigorous.

New York is entirely unlivable. Washington is the upper limit of urbanity that I could possibly ever deal with on a day-to-day basis. There are too many people in New York. There's no breathing room. There's the incessant monotonous march of regular blocks. Urbanistically, Washington wins, hands down. However, as far as the arts are concerned, New York beats everyone else, hands down. But, that doesn't make the city more livable in my eyes, it just makes me happy that I live only a short four hours away at this point.

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I've missed Grand Rapids. I try not to cloud my mind unnecessarily with future plans, but one that I do fixate upon is that I would like to move back to Grand Rapids when the time comes. A professor whom I admire at Ball State would always admonish us, "Never give up on your hometown and never be ashamed of where you're from." This admonition, I think, stings the Hoosiers a bit more than it stung me, because it's very difficult for me to ever feel ashamed of West Michigan. I'm not going to gush on and on about how it's a "special place", but I will say there's a lot of raw material, so to speak, that makes it an interesting place to live.

People I meet in DC are utterly fascinated and bewildered by the Midwest. A classmate from New Jersey has never been further west than Penn State, and she was baffled when we had a lecture on Chicago, declaring "I never knew Lake Michigan was that big!" It's interesting being a stereotype. For many people I meet, Michigan is indistinguishable from anything else between Ohio and Colorado. This confronts my thinking in a harsh way, because there's a strong current of what you might call Michigander Exceptionalism in the Midwest. Michigan is different from everything around it. You can compare Indiana with Ohio and Illinois and be ok. Minnesota and Wisconsin are similar. But, Michigan is different.

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I've made a lot of progress on my genealogical research in the past few weeks. For a long time, I had no information on my paternal grandfather's ancestors. I just new my great-grandparents' names and that they were from eastern Austria. I have since been able to trace back from my great-grandparents back to the beginning of the 19th Century. They were all ethnic Germans who lived in what was then the western edge of the Kingdom of Hungary. Nowadays, the territory they hailed from is a part of Austria. 

An interesting thing I've discovered throughout my research is how heterogenous my family is. There are unexpected little blips of different ethnicities that just pop up sometimes, much to my surprise. For instance, I was researching my grandma's grandfather, whose name was Frank Ryan. I had always been told he was Irish. His father was in fact a half Irish, half English Canadian, but his mother was French Canadian, descended from a family who were among the first settlers of Detroit. I guess the point is that the further you go back, the murkier things become. I started out my research thinking I was Austrian, Slovak, Polish, French Canadian, and Irish. I'm actually Austrian, Hungarian, Slovak, Ruthenian, Polish, French Canadian, Belgian, Swiss, Irish, German, and English.

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Christmas was really nice this year. We had a lot of snow (about 14 inches) on the ground, and there were flurries throughout the day. We went to Midnight Mass at the Cathedral, which was beautiful as always. The chanting of Tollite Hostias and O Magnum Mysterium left a deep impression this year. This was the first time I have seen our new bishop of Grand Rapids. Not that it matters, but I like him. 

I got a hiking backpack, a winter coat, a little DVD player, and a nice messenger bag from my parents. It seemed a lot to me, but I won't complain about it. They will all be put to good use. I'm looking forward to doing more serious hiking in the future. Friends have a February camping trip in Virginia planned, so it will probably come in handy then. 

Friday we head up to the cottage for our extended New Years gathering. Many of the cousins will be up this year. Grandpa reported that the ice on the lake is about ten inches thick - unusually thick for this time of year. It will be good for hockey.

Champion Grandparents

The eighteen children of Francis Xavier and Delphine Pilon as photographed at their home in Bay City, Michigan in 1905. Mr. and Mrs. F.X. Pilon are my great-great-great-grandparents on my mother's side. Mr. Pilon's forbears hailed from Bayeux, Normandy, via a two-century stay in the Province of Quebec. Mrs. Pilon (nee Waters) was of mixed Belgian, French, Irish, and English ancestry, though she was born in Montreal. The couple moved to Michigan around the turn-of-the-century and lived in Bay City before eventually settling in River Rouge, a downriver suburb of Detroit.

An article in a Detroit paper in August 1936 lauded the pair as "Champion Grandparents". At press time, Mr. and Mrs. Pilon had 17 living children, 71 living grandchildren, and 54 living great-grandchildren. A mass in honor of their 60th wedding anniversary was attended by over 100 of their living descendants at the now-demolished but formerly grand church of Our Lady of Lourdes.

Delphine Pilon the younger, the third child of Francis Xavier and the elder Delphine, is my great-great-grandmother (pictured second row, second from left). She met and fell in love with Henry Hebert, scion of one of French Canada's most ancient families, whose roots go to the very foundations of the colony. She was widowed at a fairly young age, and she lived with her parents for the remainder of their lives.

Of Slovakia

I wrote a lengthy post the other day about some of my French Canadian and English Puritan ancestors and some of the intriguing portions of their lives. In fairness to my father's side of the family, I thought I'd post a little bit about my grandmother's Slovak roots. My grandmother's parents immigrated to these United States from the small village of Jakubany in eastern Slovakia (at that time a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire). The village itself is nestled in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains in a region historically contested among the Austrian, Prussian, and Russian forces.

Seems like a rather idyllic place to me. We have records of my grandmother's family living in this same village since the late 1600s. An interesting note is that they were all Greek Catholics - Christians whose liturgy reflects Eastern Orthodox traditions but who are in communion with the Pope. The only church in town (pictured above) is Sts. Peter and Paul Slovak Greek Catholic Church.

This is the interior of the church. Note the Eastern influences including the iconostasis (icon screen), and the rich iconography. My grandma's parents left Jakubany in 1913 and moved to Windber, Pennsylvania. My great-grandfather mined coal and my great-grandmother raised twelve children. When my great-grandfather died of the black lung, the family moved to Detroit, where some of the elder sons had already found jobs at Ford. When my grandma married my grandpa, she stopped attending Greek Catholic services in favor of his Roman Rite tradition.

Puritan Connections

Though I am at most a fourth generation American citizen, my family's history on the North American continent goes back much further - some 400 or so years - via the French presence in the province of Quebec. The settlers of Nouvelle France were a "priest-ridden people", which has ensured that copious parish records have survived through the ages. Hence, that portion of my family is rather well documented all the way back to those intrepid souls who left the fishing villages of Normandy in the early 1600s. There is, however, an interesting hiccup in this rather uniform narrative of French ancestry. It turns out I have one or two Puritans lurking in the family tree. The tale of John and Hannah Swarton is the bizarrely intriguing link between Puritan New England and French Montreal.

John Swarton hailed from Jersey, one of the Channel Islands - British territories that lie off the northern coast of France. In the chaos of the English Civil War, King Charles II fled Britain for the continent, perhaps stopping off at Jersey along the way. In any event, John Swarton joined the military forces of Charles II in Flanders (modern day Belgium) and was a part of the army that helped restore Charles to the throne in 1660. The historical record is relatively silent until 1687 when John Swarton was awarded a grant of fifty acres in North Yarmouth in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (North Yarmouth is now a suburb of Portland, Maine).

Swarton had married a certain Hannah Hibbard in Beverly, Massachusetts on January 6, 1671, meaning he must have emigrated from England rather soon after Charles' restoration (most likely during the reign of the Catholic King James II before the Protestant resurgence of power under William and Mary during the Glorious Revolution in 1688). Hannah Hibbard was the daughter of Robert Hibbard, a weaver's apprentice from Salisbury, England, who had settled in Salem, Massachusetts, sometime before 1640. The Hibbards were an interesting family in their own right since they were distantly descended from King Edward I through the Earls of Devon - but that is a story for another time.

John Swarton and Hannah Hibbard were living in North Yarmouth during a tumultuous period of colonial history known as King William's War (the colonial outgrowth of Continental European wars spawned by the Glorious Revolution and the accession of William and Mary to the English throne). The French and their Native American allies were eager to stop English encroachment symbolized by the new settlements around Fort Loyal (the site of modern-day Portland). The French mounted a raid on those settlements in 1689, which was repelled by forces under Major Benjamin Church. The next May, the French returned and captured the settlements and killed many of the settlers - including John Swarton. The rest were taken as prisoners and hauled off to Quebec.

Hannah Swarton was, by all accounts, a very pious Puritan woman. She kept a journal of her captivity that was published in 1697 as an appendix to a book by prominent Puritan minister Cotton Mather entitled "Humiliations Followed With Deliverances". Hannah and her three surviving children, Mary, Samuel, and Jasper, were pressured to convert to Catholicism while captives in Quebec. Hannah Swarton described the ordeal thusly: "The lady, my mistress, the nuns, the priests, the friars and the rest set upon me. . . to perswade me to turn Papist." She remained steadfast and was eventually allowed to return to Massachusetts Bay, though her children did not accompany her.

Her daughter, Mary Swarton, stayed in Quebec and eventually married John Lahaye, an Irishman from Tullow. He was raised Catholic, despite having a Protestant mother, but he later strayed into Puritanism before finally being readmitted to the Catholic Church prior to his marriage:

"On Monday, 19 March 1696, Jean Lahe born in 1670 at Tollo in Ireland of the marriage of Thomas Lahé, Catholic, and of Catharine Williams, Protestant, and baptized in his country in the Catholic religion & later having professed the Puritan religion until last year, when he was taken in the month of July among the Flemish of Corlar and living now in the service of M. le Ber, Merchant, solemnly made abjuration of heresy [renounced heretical ideas - i.e. Puritanism] into the hands of Mre. Henri Antoine Meriel, Priest of the Seminary of Ville Marie, authorized to receive it by M. François Dolie priest, Grand Vicaire etc. And this in the presence of M. Yves Priat, priest of said Seminary of Ville Marie [Montreal] and of several others." (Signed by all herein named.)

The pair were married in Montreal on the 9th of Septermber, 1697, and eventually had eleven children (two of which I directly descend from - yes, that means that distant cousins married at some point along the way - it happens).

An interesting anecdote regarding Mr. Lahaye regards him and another English captive attempting to counterfeit money. The charge was sent in a letter to King Louis XIV, who dropped all charges because of the "great service he has already rendered to the colony" and because the bills "were so badly made, no one could've been deceived."

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I'm unsure whether this story has a moral or not, but it is always interesting to look back at the unfathomably large tapestry of consequences woven by our actions. We cannot see all the ends of our decisions. If one little circumstance of these events had been slightly different, I would not be here as I am today. A tiny genetic part of me comes from Mary Swarton and John Lahaye. I would not have that part if Yarmouth had never been attacked, or had the Swartons all been killed instead of captured, or had John Swarton never bothered to leave the Isle of Jersey with Charles II. That's the fascinating thing about history and about genealogy in particular - you are looking at the story of yourself.


Source: New England Captives Carried to Canada between 1677-1760 During the French and Indian Wars by Emma Lewis Coleman

Treasures from the past

Last Saturday was my sister's graduation party, which had the rather obvious effect of bringing together both family and friends from the far corners of the earth. My aunt and uncle, who are currently in the midst of a move from Indiana to Florida, discovered an old trunk of my grandpa's that they had forgotten about in their spare room. Since their new space in Florida will be rather more constrained, they were kind enough to leave it in our possession.

And what a treasure it is! It is chock full of memories from a time that my grandma never talks about and that my dad knows very little about. It's all quite fascinating. There are two albums full of old photos of my grandpa in his youth. One of them is an entire scrapbook of his tour of duty during the Korean War. The photo below shows my great-grandmother and her seven children. My grandpa is the one seated on the car.

Most intriguing to me were the objects of religious significance. There was a stack of funeral prayer cards about four inches thick. They were interesting because of the genealogical information many of them provided, and because of the religious artwork portrayed (since my grandma's family were Greek Catholic). There was even a prayer card for John F. Kennedy included in the collection.

I also discovered three prayer books. One was my grandpa's Sunday Missal from his youth (presumably from his First Communion). Another was a similar Missal from when my grandparents got married. The third, and most interesting find, was a prayer book from my grandma's First Communion, which was written in both English and Old Church Slavonic. It was enlightening to read through some of the liturgy and prayers of the Eastern Churches.

This trunk of things will be a treasure for the family for many years.

In Memoriam

My grandfather was a veteran of this nation's Armed Forces. He served in Korea during the conflict there. As far as I know - and I don't know much - he was involved in the maintenance of the aircraft. I don't believe he was ever in a combat situation, but then again, I don't know. Sometimes I'm saddened by the fact that my grandpa died when I was only in eighth grade. In eighth grade, I wasn't concerned with understanding the lives of my relatives - our sense of history is so numb at that age.

Please join me this Veteran's Day in praying for the deceased souls of all of our service men and women. May God grant them a place of refreshment, light, and peace.

The photo at left is my grandfather during his tour of Korea. Once, at my aunt's house, we found a photo album that my grandpa had put together of all of his time in the war. This was one of the pictures inside. I love this picture - the mustache is definitely what seals the deal!

These Will Make Fine Ancestors

I am rather interested in the history of my own family. I am what you could call a mutt of Catholic Europe with parts French, Czech, Polish, Slovak, and Austrian. The Austrian branch is the most intriguing part of things for me, since it is the source of my surname. However, sadly, I know least about them, aside from some generalities and locations. This picture shows some of my Austrian ancestors - regrettably, I don't know their names or relation to me. I do know that this picture was taken in Sankt Michael im Burgenland, a small village in eastern present-day Austria that was under the dominion of the Kingdom of Hungary during the time of the photo. I am unsure if these persons emigrated, but their sons and daughters may have. The cause was likely Hungary's intense program of Magyarization around the turn of the century, which sought to stamp out German culture in Hungary. Interestingly, this social movement caused the bizarre inclusion of another consonant in our last name, rendering it the even-more-unpronounceable Schmalczel.

The Schmalzel Story

Many times I am asked what I am. By that, usually the person asking is trying to understand what kind of people my ancestors were and where they came from. I never have a clear-cut answer, meaning I'm not one of those people who can rattle off that they are German, Irish, and Italian and be done with it. As far as I'm aware (and I'm very aware of my family history), I'm mostly ethnic German by way of the Hungarian part of Austria-Hungary, with touches of Slovak, Czech, Polish, Irish, and French by way of Quebec tossed in the mix. I find genealogy a very engaging thing to study, because I'm a nerd like that. I simply appreciate who "my people" were and how they or their descendants ever ended up in the US.

Generally speaking, my ancestors on all sides have been fairly recent immigrants to this country. The vast majority of my forefathers were of various ethnicities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and came to the New World during that empire's demise around the turn of the century. The major exception to this rule are those who were French Canadians. That end of the family has been present in North America since the early 1600s, but in Quebec, not the United States. That branch worked its way up the St. Lawrence from Quebec City to Ontario, finally jumping from Ontario to Michigan in the mid-1800s.

There are plentiful records of this French-Canadian branch due to the copious records kept by the churches of New France and compiled by a priest by the name of Fr. Cyprien Tanguay in the 1870s. These records stretch back to the original immigrations from France in the 1620s and 30s and from there a few generations back to the time when the families were still inhabiting Normandy. This is an interesting study because some of the family lines stretch back to the 14th and 15th centuries and are intermingled with some of the minor nobility of feudal France.

France and New France were under the control of strong, centralized monarchs for most of their history. This means that records of birth (or more usually, baptism), marriage, and death are widely preserved and easy to locate. However, the majority of my ancestors are from volatile Eastern Europe, where many cultures have existed in competition alongside one another for centuries. Political power was divided among the Holy Roman Emperor and local lords in a complex system of feudal allegiance. Records were not well kept, save by the local parishes who were commanded to keep records of the sacraments administered in their churches by order of the Council of Trent (1545-1563).

That being said, the search for the Schmalzels has proven difficult. I can only directly trace persons back to the mid-1800s in the person of my great-great-grandfather Johann Schmalzel, whose son, Stephen, immigrated from Austria in 1907. From there, I can speak only in generalities, taking into account wider historical movements and other clues. Here follows a narrative of what I've discovered so far about my patronymic ancestors.

The name Schmalzel is most likely related to the German word schmalz which has been variously translated as over-sentimentality, kiss, lard, and goose fat. Not a particularly flattering start. One interpretation I have seen is that the name schmalzel refers to someone who handled wax, candles, or soap in Medieval households - termed chandler in English. Lard and goose fat are not a far cry from wax and candles, especially in Medieval times. We shall then claim that the original Schmalzels were in charge of illumination in some corner of the Medieval world.

But, which corner? In all likelihood, the Schmalzel family did not originate in the part of Austria-Hungary that they immigrated from. Why? Because for much of its history, that borderland area was fought over between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans. The emperors of Austria were begging people to settle that desolate land in the 1700s after they had finally vanquished the Ottoman threat. The most compelling argument is that the Schmalzels, like many other families who would eventually inhabit the Burgenland, originated in southwestern Germany in a region called Swabia. A big clue here is that many names and words in the Swabian dialect end in either -le or -el whereas this is less common in the rest of Germany. This could explain the uncharacteristic el at the end of Schmalzel.

When the Burgenland needed resettlement as a buffer between the Austrian heartland and Ottoman-controlled Hungary in the mid-1700s, the Emperors appealed to Germans living in other parts of the Empire - most notably Swabia. Like the American Pioneers, people in Swabia were in need of money and land for farming, and the Austrians had both. The people that would eventually leave Swabia for Austria were termed Donauschwaben or Danube Swabians because they settled along the Danube River which flows from Ulm, Germany (in the heart of Swabia) to the Black Sea, right through what would become Austria-Hungary.

Those that arrived first in Austria settled in the closer locales, such as the Burgenland first, before eventually filling into much of Hungary and the Transylvania region of Romania. The Schmalzels were likely among the first waves of settlers, since they remained in a region close to the Austrian Crown lands. The exact town of their settlement is unknown, but they were definitely in the region near Güssing and Sankt Michael im Burgenland, as evidenced by stamped family photos from a later time. My family was probably occupied by farming at this time. The villages in that part of the Austrian Burgenland were arranged in strips, so that a house fronted the street, and a long narrow field extended from the house into the woods, which was used for cultivation.

Trouble came with the Ausgleich of 1867, which set up the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary. Since the Burgenland was just outside traditional Austrian lands, it was considered part of the Kingdom of Hungary. Thus, Hungary and Austria were effectively two separately administered kingdoms, united under a single emperor, a Habsburg of Austria. With the rise of nationalism in Europe around this time, the German minority of Hungary, including those along the border with Austria, found themselves in a predicament. The Hungarians, eager to regain a sense of their culture that had been overrun by both Austrian and Ottoman imperialism, set out on a social campaign of Magyarization (Magyar being the ethnic term for Hungarians, as well as the language spoken in Hungary).

Magyarization involved teaching Hungarian in schools instead of German (or any other minority language), and the squelching of German culture in Hungarian lands. Names, even, were Magyarized, with Schmalzel becoming the even-more-unpronounceable Schmalczel during this time. The local church was one of the only ways that the minority Germans in Hungarian lands were able to keep their local sense of community, as both Austria and Hungary promoted the influence of the Catholic Church. It was a less ethnically charged environment as well, since Latin dominated Church records and affairs.

Cause of Stephen Schmalzel's immigration is unknown, but probably fits in with the mindset massive wave of immigrants that fled Eastern Europe in the early 20th Century. He was likely searching for a more promising future in America. He immigrated around 1909 and settled in New York City. He was married in 1910 to Anna Jani (prounounced Yah-nee), who was from another town in Burgenland: the mouthful, Deutsch Tschantschendorf. It is unclear if they immigrated together, or met in New York. The marriage record is from the Church of the Assumption, which to the best of my research, is located in Brooklyn.

From there, Stephen and Anna moved to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and Stephen worked in some sort of industry there, perhaps coal mining or steel manufacturing. Around 1920, the couple was in Lincoln Park, a suburb of Detroit, with Stephen working in the booming manufacturing business there. It was in Lincoln Park that my grandpa and his seven siblings grew up. The rest, as they say, is history.

I hope you've enjoyed this whirlwind journey from a quiet corner of Germany, to an empty corner of Austria-Hungary, to an industrial corner of Michigan. So, if you ask, the Schmalzels were Germans, who came from what is now modern Austria, but what was then in the Hungarian part of Austria-Hungary. Sometimes I wish I could just say Germany, but that is not nearly as much fun.

Pictured are my great-grandparents, Stephen and Anna Schmalzel.