Six generations · both sides · every fact sourced
Two families, one corner of Europe each, and the same ocean.
On one side, Carpathian villagers who came through a Pennsylvania steel town to a Connecticut factory town and re-founded their parish on three blocks of it. On the other, four German-speaking Catholic families out of one small upland region who crossed within a few years of each other and then moved together for forty years and three states. Everything on this site is marked with how well it is known. Click any name to see the person. Click again to see the proof.
Start here
The shortest possible version of both lines.
Paternal — Turek and Macura
Carpathian, Slovak and Rusyn, Greek Catholic and then Orthodox. and arrived in 1904 and settled at Duquesne, Pennsylvania — 560 Oliver Street in 1906, North Sixth Street by 1910. He was a railroad labourer; both were still aliens; their mother tongue was Slovak. Neither has been found in any record after the 1910 census. Fourteen searches, all logged.
Their eldest son married at Bridgeport on 29 September 1928. He was a broaching machine operator at General Electric. She arrived in 1920, never naturalised, and had no schooling at all — and answered the census taker for the whole household in 1940.
Their son — Air Force, then forty years a mechanic at Sikorsky — married .
Maternal — Kramer and Lenz
German and Dutch, Catholic, farming. married in Meeker County, Minnesota on 8 November 1928 — certificate N-217. Ten children; nine reached adulthood. He farmed as a hired hand, then laboured, then worked the Litchfield Woolen Mills. She taught in a Nobles County rural school at eighteen.
Behind them stand four immigrant couples out of one small region: Lenz from Alendorf, Klinkhammer from Ripsdorf next door, Pint from Kyllburg, Lichter from Röhl, Loch from Bitburg — and Cremers, alone, from Sittard in the Netherlands.
Bitburg, Röhl and Kyllburg lie within twelve kilometres of each other. Alendorf and Ripsdorf are neighbours forty kilometres north. Only the Cremers are from outside the Eifel.
How to read anything on this site
Nothing here is stated flatly unless a record says it. Every fact carries one of these six marks, and a fact marked as a guess stays marked as a guess.
Read from a primary record — a census page, a certificate, a parish register, a ship's manifest.
From an obituary or a contributor-maintained memorial. Usually right; occasionally wrong about dates.
Reasoning from documented facts. Not a record.
From Chris directly. Kept separate from what the documents show.
Explicitly not proven. Stated so it can be tested, not so it can be believed.
A search that came back empty, recorded so nobody covers the same ground twice.
Or watch it happen on a map
Walk it backwards starts at Chris and asks you to pick a parent. It then retraces that person from the place they died to the place they were born, one stop at a time — and when it gets there, hands you their parents. Bridgeport to Duquesne to a Carpathian village; Litchfield to Belle Plaine to Kenosha County to the Eifel. Press play and watch, or step through it yourself.
The things a family actually remembers
The details that are worth keeping, whatever else the records say.
He went to the Klondike
left the family farm with a party from Adrian on 26 February 1898, prospected and mined for a year and a half, left the north on 12 June 1899, and reached home in August. He married the following February — in a double wedding at Adrian on 20 February 1900, alongside his own sister Theresa and her brother Anton. By 1930 he owned his farm and had a radio.
Two sets of twins in one household
was a twin. He and his sister Jennie are both entered as six in the 1880 census, and his brothers Benjiman and Henry are both four. Two sets of twins, visible on one page — which corroborates the family memorial's claim of fifteen children including three sets of twins, from a federal record.
He was twenty-three. She was forty-four.
married Catharina Bremers at Sittard on 14 April 1844. Both ages are on the one civil record, written by the registrar at the time. She died in 1857; the marriage was childless; he remarried at thirty-eight. That the first marriage produced no children is what keeps this line intact — and proving it took searching thirteen years of a Dutch birth index.
The surname changed with the crossing
The Cremers daughters born in Europe are Cremers. The ship's manifest writes Kremers. Every child from 1864 onward is Kramer. One family, three spellings, one Atlantic.
Registered before he was named
appears in the Minnesota birth index only as "Baby Boy Kramer", born 10 February 1935 — the certificate was filed before the christening. He lived about two years and is buried at Calvary, Litchfield, in his parents' own cemetery.
A name with no ancestor behind it
is named for his father's best friend, who died before he was born. The research went looking for a Leonard ancestor across seven surnames on both sides and found none anywhere. The absence was the clue — it confirmed the family story instead of contradicting it.
The teacher
The 1920 census finds at eighteen, still at home on the farm, with her occupation given as TEACHING and her industry as RURAL SCHOOL. She then married and raised nine children, and no census ever recorded an occupation for her again. It is the only one there is.
A physical description, from 1942
was 5 ft 9 in and 185 lb, ruddy, with brown hair and blue eyes. In 1930 his household included a servant, Margaret Brummer, 20, and a lodger, John Kramer, 16 — who was his own brother.
The Carpathian side, at length
Duquesne, 1906
Pennsylvania began registering births statewide on 1 January 1906. was born on 5 May 1906, at home, delivered by a midwife, at 560 Oliver Street in Duquesne. Four months earlier and there would be no certificate at all — and without it, his mother's maiden name, Brintsko, would not be known. It appears on that document and on no other document anywhere.
By April 1910 the family were on North Sixth Street, in a block that reads like a village register: Patrosko, Rotrisko, Harabas, Yakubovic, Turik, Sivik, Kotraly, Kocur, Petrisko. George the elder was a railroad labourer. Both parents were still aliens. Their mother tongue was Slovak, although every neighbour on that stretch was Ruthenian.
Bridgeport, and a parish
married at Bridgeport on 29 September 1928. In April 1930 they rented 627 Hallett Street at $15 a month, with no radio and a baby daughter, and the employment column on the census reads No — he was out of work the day the enumerator called. Ten years later they owned 715 Shelton Street outright, valued at $2,000, and he worked at General Electric.
The Shelton Street neighbours in 1950, read straight off the census sheet, were Semanchik, Krizan, Piatak, Zihala, Kaputa, Beniash, Rabik, Schibia, Marczak, Reho and Grand. Not a mixed neighbourhood — a Carpathian village re-founded on three blocks of an American factory town, a few streets from the church its people had built.
That church is St John the Baptist, founded by Carpatho-Russian immigrants who reached Bridgeport early in 1880. In November 1937 a congress of the parish severed its ties with Rome over Rome's insistence on clerical celibacy for the Eastern rite. The congregation lost its property in the courts and the Supreme Court declined the appeal; they raised over $200,000 in loan certificates in two weeks, plus $150 a family, and dedicated a new church on Mill Hill Avenue in June 1946. Every Turek and Macura in this research is buried in its cemetery at Stratford.
Two villages, and one that is still a guess
The Macura village is settled. Nicholas Macura swore before a United States court at Bridgeport in 1942 that he was born at Jastreb — today Šarišské Jastrabie in Šariš. A 1908 manifest names the same village with its county, Sáros. And in 1920, the exact year Susie sailed, the village's official name was literally "Jastreb", with Lipany as the market town its people worked in. Her manifest reads "Festreb, Lipjany". It is not garbled. It is precise.
Torysky remains the hypothesis for the Tureks, and it is a good one. A Turek born at Torysky swore to it in Fairfield County in 1923. A Brinsko born at Torysky swore to it in Pittsburgh in 1937 — and lived in Duquesne Ward 1, the Turiks' own ward. A Brinczko of Tarczafő, Szepes sailed to Bridgeport in 1907. A Torysky woman married a Jastrabie man and is buried at Stratford with the rest of the family. And Torysky is both Slovak and Rusyn at once, in the part of Spiš that became Czechoslovakia rather than Poland — which is exactly what "Hungary/Slovak" in 1910 and "Czechoslovakia" in 1930 require of the same two people.
The prairie side, at length
They did not meet on the prairie
This is the single most useful thing the maternal research turned up, and it took six records across thirty years to see it.
Lenz, Pint and Klinkhammer were all in Kenosha County, Wisconsin around 1860 — Lenz and Pint in Brighton township, Klinkhammers at Somers, the next one over. All three were at Belle Plaine, Scott County, Minnesota by the 1870s. Then moved to Grand Prairie Township, Nobles County in 1883, and moved to the same township in the spring of 1884 — one year apart, two hundred miles south-west.
So when two Lenz brothers married two Pint sisters at Adrian, in 1894 and again in the double wedding of 1900, they were marrying people their families had lived beside for forty years and three states.
Three farms on adjoining sections
grew up on the east half of Section 9 in Grand Prairie Township. Her paternal grandfather farmed Section 4 and half of Section 3, adjoining. Her maternal grandfather farmed the northeast quarter of Section 4, the same township. The family memory — a farm, with grandparents farming nearby — checks out exactly, and it turns out to mean both sets, on adjoining sections.
The seventeen children
The family story was that there were seventeen children and thirteen survived. It was true, and it was two generations off.
| Family | Relationship to Chris | Children |
|---|---|---|
| and | 3× great-grandparents | Seventeen |
| and | 3× great-grandparents | Thirteen, all surviving to adulthood |
| and | 3× great-grandparents | Fifteen, three sets of twins |
Both numbers in the story are real — seventeen and thirteen — in two different families that married into each other in the same generation. Whether the story was originally about one of them or fused two over the years is a question for the family rather than the archives.
What is still open
Eight questions the online record cannot answer. Five documents would answer most of them, and none of the five is on the internet.
On the Turek side
- and after 1910. Fourteen searches, all negative, all logged. Not solvable online.
- 's parents. Also not solvable online.
- The 1904 manifests — not at New York under any spelling.
- Where and when and married. Not in any Minnesota index, so most likely Connecticut.
On the Kramer side
- 's parents — a strong lead at Shakopee, not proven, because the 1860 census names that daughter Margaret.
- 's birth record — in neither Minnesota index.
- 's and 's obituaries — Meeker County Historical Society only.
- after 1864. She landed with the family and vanishes.