Day: October 14, 2026

This morning, in the first part of Frank Tarant’s story, the wall came down on the Bohemia side. We found Frank’s baptism in Čelákovice, his parents the master baker Josef and Maria Žák, his wife Theresia Bechyň of Sadská, and the road that carried their son Josef all the way to a hospital in Logansport, Indiana — where his 1928 death certificate listed the informant as the hospital itself, because the institution didn’t know who his people were.

This afternoon, the wall came down a second time — and this time, the papers were in the family’s hands all along.

Going back through my own files today, I found the rest of Josef’s story: the family’s own paperwork, kept for nearly a hundred years.

A daughter goes to court

In July 1927, Josef’s daughter Marie — my great-grandmother — went to the Circuit Court of Marshall County, Indiana, and petitioned for her father’s care. The application is in her own handwriting. Joseph, she wrote, had come to Indiana in 1909 from Chicago, and to Marshall County in March 1927. He was a farmer, retired, but he had worked on the farm up to 1927. And she set down, plainly and gently, what the family had been living with: for about two years he had been failing. He would run away from home. He did not know where he was, or why he had left — except that he was going back to his old home. In his last two weeks at home, the family had to watch him, and see that he ate. Marie believed the trouble began with a land deal: he had sold his farm, she wrote, and “did not realize as much as he expected”; it seemed to prey on his mind. The doctor who examined him in Plymouth wrote that Josef was “very talkative, constantly referring to a land deal he made,” and did not know where he was.

The court granted the petition, and Josef was received at Logansport State Hospital on July 23, 1927 — the very date his death certificate gives as the start of his doctor’s attendance. The discharge papers in the file were never filled in. He was never discharged. He died there on November 2, 1928.

Let me be as plain about this as Marie was. Josef’s death certificate gives his cause of death as arteriosclerosis and states no other diagnosis, and I will not invent one for him here, either. What the court file shows is not a scandal. It is a daughter doing what a family did in 1927 for someone they loved who was no longer safe in his own mind: she went to court, answered every question honestly, and got him care. On that application, his emergency contact is written in her hand: “Mrs. Marie Gilbert (daughter), Plymouth, Ind.”

What Marie knew about Frank and Theresia

The family-history page of that same file, sworn to by Marie, also gives us the first death information we have ever had for Frank and Theresia. It is family knowledge, written down by a granddaughter who never knew them — not a death record — and I label it exactly that way. It says Frank died of tuberculosis, “about 36”; and that Theresia died of old age, at 82. If Theresia was 82, she died about 1915–1916, most likely in Indiana — which means there is a death record out there to hunt, and the hunt is on. Frank’s “about 36” does not sit comfortably beside his appearance in the 1870 census, and I won’t pretend it does. But the family’s memory that consumption took him is new, and it is theirs, and it is recorded here as what it is.

The estate, and a daughter we couldn’t place

Five weeks after Josef’s death, on December 6, 1928, Marie was back in court for the Letters of Administration of his estate. Josef left personal property of $666 and real estate of $800, and the paper names his heirs with their ages and addresses: Anna Runik, 48, of South Trumbull Avenue, Chicago — a daughter whose married name we did not have until this paper surfaced; Anton Tarant, 35, of Cicero, Illinois; and Marie Gilbert, 33, of Plymouth. The paper also leaves us one honest puzzle: Josef’s son Frank, born in 1886, is not named among the heirs. We don’t know why yet. It goes on the still-hunting list, exactly as it stands.

Marie, and George, come home

The files held two more answers. Marie’s own Indiana death certificate shows she was born April 8, 1896, in Wisconsin, and died May 16, 1985, at Pilgrim Manor Nursing Home in Plymouth, and rests in New Oak Hill Cemetery there.

And a newspaper clipping closes a question this family has carried since 1944: Marie’s nephew George Tarant, the B-24 waist gunner shot down over Denmark, was brought home. His funeral was held in Plymouth, and he lies in New Oak Hill Cemetery — the same ground as his Aunt Marie. The grave in Denmark was a wartime resting place. Plymouth is his home.

Where these treasures came from

A note on where these photographs and papers come from, because credit matters: the family’s photographs that travel with these papers — Joseph and Antonie together, the old Joseph Tarant farm, Marie’s school picture, the Gilbert family home on South Plum Street, and many more — were gathered and shared by Violet Jean (Belt) Gilbert (1929–2011), Marie’s daughter-in-law, whose name stands as donor on dozens of photographs in our family files. Several others, including Marie with little Jimmy, came from Nancy (Gilbert) Allen. The story of the Catholic picture — the painting at the top of this post — came from Clifford Berger, Marie’s grandson, who sent it in 2009 with a handwritten note (you’ll find it in the album below). The picture, he wrote, was “brought over from Bohemia by Joseph Tarnut” [his spelling], one of three or four that hung in Grandma Marie’s bedroom when the grandchildren were small. The others were donated to a Catholic church in the South Bend, Indiana area; this one came to Cliff through his mother, Lauretta Gilbert Berger — Marie’s daughter. This post exists because they kept these things, and passed them on.

The family, in photographs

The photographs in this section have been tidied very gently — a little contrast, a little sharpness, nothing more. No face has been redrawn and nothing has been added or taken away; they are the same photographs, just a touch easier to see. The originals, exactly as they came down to us, are in the album at the end of this post, so anyone can compare them.

Still hunting

• Theresia’s Indiana death record, about 1915–1916 — the family-history page says she died of old age at 82.
• Why Josef’s son Frank (b. 1886) is not among his father’s 1928 heirs.
• Frank’s own arrival in America, and his grave — the family’s memory says tuberculosis took him young; the 1870 census says he was in Kewaunee, Wisconsin. Both things are on the table until a record settles it.

The wall came down twice in one day — once in the Bohemian registers this morning, and once this afternoon, in papers my own family kept. If you are sitting on a box of family papers, go look in it. You may already be holding your brick wall’s other side.

The album — the originals, untouched

These are the photographs exactly as they were handed down and scanned — no tidying of any kind; the only addition is our small monogram watermark. This is the family’s album, as it came to us.

Sources

1. Application and commitment file for Joseph Tarant, Circuit Court of Marshall County, Indiana, July 1927 — the family’s own papers, including the family-history page sworn by Marie Gilbert.
2. Letters of Administration, estate of Joseph Tarant, Marshall County, Indiana, December 6, 1928 — the family’s own papers.
3. Death certificate of Marie Tarant Gilbert, Indiana, State No. 85-018813, May 16, 1985 — the family’s own papers.
4. Descendants of Frank and Theressa Tarant, compiled family report and photograph collection (Coni Dubois, 2026) — photograph donor credits as noted in the text.
5. Handwritten note of Clifford Berger, July 23, 2009, accompanying the Catholic picture — the family’s own papers.
6. For the Bohemia side — Frank’s baptism, the Prague marriage, Josef’s baptism, and the rest — see the sources in Part 1 of this story.

© 2026 Ever Widening Circle Research by Coni Dubois LLC. All rights reserved.

By Coni Marie

Some brick walls stand for thirty years. This one stood in my files for most of my researching life — and then, in one long night of work, it came down.

Meet my second great-grandfather, Frank Tarant. When this week began, here is everything I could prove about him: he was born in Bohemia. He married a woman named Theressa, whose maiden name I did not know. They had a son, Josef, born about March 1858 in Sadská, Bohemia. And Frank appears in exactly one American record — the 1870 census of Kewaunee, Kewaunee County, Wisconsin, written down as “Frank Trant,” age 32. After 1870, nothing. No death record. No grave. No second census. His parents were listed in my files as unknown, because they were.

That was the wall. Here is the night it broke.

A baptism in Sadská

The first crack came from the parish registers of Sadská, a small town in the Elbe lowland of Central Bohemia. In the Roman Catholic birth register for 1853–1858 (Sadská 18, image 131), there is my great-grandfather’s baptism: Josef Tarant, born in Sadská in March 1858, son of František Tarant of Sadská.

Written in Latin in the margin of that entry is the sentence that opened everything:

“Proles hæc, Josef, per subsequens matrimonium inter parentes quod Pragæ, ad Sct. Petrum die 22 Februarii 1859 contractum legitimata est.”

In plain English: This child, Josef, was legitimized by the subsequent marriage of his parents, contracted at Prague, at St. Peter’s, on 22 February 1859. The entry also notes that a duplicate of Josef’s baptismal certificate was issued on September 22, 1880 — right before his own marriage, when he would have needed it.

Josef came into this world eleven months before his parents could marry. That was not a scandal to hide; it was written right into his baptism record, because the Church and the Empire both ran on paper. And that paper pointed straight to Prague.

A wedding in Prague

At the City Archive of Prague, in the marriage register of St. Peter na Poříčí (PE O10), the index carries one line: Tarant, 1859, 22. Februar. The entry itself, on February 22, 1859, gave me in one stroke what thirty years of files could not:

The groom: Franz Tarant, a soldier, born at Čelákovice No. 33, in the district of Brandýs — the legitimate son of Josef Tarant, master baker, and Maria, née Žák.

The bride: Theresia Bechyň — there was Theressa’s maiden name at last — born at Sadská No. 278, the legitimate daughter of Josef Bechyň, citizen and weaver, and Marie, née Charvát.

The wedding house was Prague No. 1177/2. The witnesses were Joseph Buchenbaum, a master cooper, and Franz Mitzschli, an innkeeper.

So now I can tell you where they were coming from. Frank was a master baker’s son from Čelákovice, a town on the Elbe east of Prague. Theresia was a weaver’s daughter from Sadská, some twenty kilometers east of there — the same flat, rich Elbe lowland, a half-day’s walk apart. Their son was born in her hometown, as was the custom, and Sadská stayed the family’s anchor for the rest of the century.

The soldier

Frank was not free to marry when Josef was born, and the register tells us exactly why. He was a serving soldier of the Austrian Empire, and an Austrian soldier could not marry without his regiment’s written permission — the Ehebewilligung. The remarks column of the marriage entry reads like the paper trail of a young man’s whole life in 1858:

• Marriage permission from the Regimental Command at Zara (Zadar, on the Dalmatian coast), July 3, 1858, No. 709 — issued four months after Josef’s birth, which is why the wedding waited until February 1859.
• An announcement and discharge certificate from the Regimental Chaplaincy at Zara, July 1858, No. 284.
• Both baptismal certificates filed as enclosures — his from Čelákovice, hers from Sadská.
• The banns read February 2, 6, and 13, 1859, in Prague and in the regimental chapel at Zara, an empire apart.

A margin note at Frank’s name ties him to a regiment numbered 23, and published army histories list Infantry Regiment 23’s colonel-in-chief in those years as Baron Airoldi — the regiment was known by his name. (We have since checked the army almanac, the Militär-Schematismus, for both 1858 and 1859: Airoldi checks out — but the regiment recruited in Lombardy, its district seat at Lodi, and the almanacs do not station it at Zara. It is Frank’s own marriage file that puts him at Zara — his battalion was posted there, whatever the regiment’s paper home. A Bohemian baker’s son in a Lombard regiment looks like a specialist posting, which fits the butcher reading below.) A word beside his name appears to read Regiments-Fleischergeselle — a regimental butcher’s journeyman — which would fit a baker’s son: a man who knew his way around provisions. That reading is tentative, and I label it so.

Think about what that means. It was not the family’s memory that preserved who Frank Tarant was. It was the Austrian Army’s paperwork — permission slips, chaplaincy certificates, banns read in two chapels a thousand kilometers apart. A working man’s life, saved by bureaucracy.

One generation deeper — found the same night

The Prague record named Frank’s parents. Before the night was over, we found them too.

In the marriage register of Čelákovice (Čelákovice 17), on September 21, 1824, Jozef Tarant, age 24, a bachelor, married Maria Žák, age 25. The entry names the generation behind them: Jozef was the son of Jan Tarant, a master craftsman of Čelákovice, and his wife, née Sobolová (her first name reads Rozina). Maria was the daughter of Antonín Žák of Čelákovice, house No. 18.

Frank’s parents. His grandparents. Names that were “Unknown” in my files on Tuesday are a matter of record on Wednesday.

Update — later the same day: the wall had one more stone to fall

After this post went up, the hunt kept going — and the Čelákovice parish index handed us the answer. Josef and Maria Tarant had two sons named František. The first, baptized 4 October 1827 at house 137, died the very next day, 5 October 1827 — the index says so plainly. Fifteen months later they gave the name again: František Salesius, baptized 29 January 1829 at house No. 33 — the same house his marriage record names as his birthplace, and he turned 30 just three weeks before his wedding, exactly the age that record gives. That is our Frank. He was in Čelákovice all along, spelled “Tarand,” hiding in the long handwriting of his own baptism.

The same index carried us further back: Frank’s father, Josef the master baker, was baptized Josef Lukáš Tarant on 21 May 1801, son of Jan Tarant, master glazier, and Kateřina Sobolová — and behind Jan stand his father Jan the weaver (b. 1752) and Václav Tarant (b. ~1715). Five generations of Tarants in one small Elbe town, standing in a row at last.

And the bride’s side of the wall fell too. Theresia Bechyň’s baptism is found: 16 September 1833, Sadská house No. 278 — daughter of Josef Bechyň, citizen of Sadská and master weaver, and Marie née Charvát, just as the Prague marriage record names them. She was 25 years and 5 months old on her wedding day — the “25” in that register is exact, the same way Frank’s “30” was. Written in the margin of her baptism, years later, is the loveliest detail of all: on 14 April 1858 the parish issued her a copy of that very baptism — the certificate she carried into her marriage file, months before the regiment at Zara gave its permission. Her own baptism entry even gives us her mother’s parents: Marie Charvát was the daughter of a Jozef, of house No. 78, and an Alžběta — one more generation standing where we had only a name.

And Frank’s mother has her beginning back, too. Maria Žák’s baptism is found: Marie Josefa Žáková, baptized 24 October 1797 at Čelákovice house No. 46 — daughter of Antonín Žák, a master craftsman, and Barbora, née Vokálková, whose name the 1824 marriage register gives outright once you read the bride’s entry at full size. We had hunted Maria in the wrong years and under a shortened name; she was in the Čelákovice birth book all along, under her full double name. She was 26 on her wedding day, not 25 as the register states — the same small drift this family’s ages always show, and the reason we trust baptisms over wedding-day arithmetic.

A daughter history almost left out — Veronika

Maria Žák had a daughter before Frank. On 6 January 1824, at house No. 18 in Čelákovice, a little girl named Veronika was baptized. The register names her mother — Maria, daughter of Antonín Žák and Barbora Vokálková — and leaves the father’s column empty; the clerk ticked the column for a child born outside marriage. Eight and a half months later, that September, Maria married Josef Tarant in the same parish.

Was Josef her father? The register does not say, and I won’t say it for him — no record names Veronika’s father, and timing is not proof. She is not carried here as Josef’s child. But she is Maria’s daughter, which makes her Frank’s elder half-sister — and kin is kin. She belongs in this story by name.

One honest footnote: the parish index gives her birth month as July. The register itself says January, and the register governs. What became of Veronika — whether she married, where she lies — is still an open thread, and we will follow her forward from here.

What the wall still holds

A broken wall is not a finished story, and I won’t pretend otherwise. Two honest loose ends:

Frank’s own baptism is not in Čelákovice. We read the town’s birth register for 1827–1839 completely — every page, every boy named František checked — and he is not there. The likeliest explanation is a very Bohemian one: the Prague clerk who wrote “born Čelákovice No. 33” was recording Frank’s legal hometown — his Heimatrecht, the civic belonging that sat with his father’s house — and a man’s legal hometown was not always the parish where he was baptized. His baptism may be in one of the parishes in the ring around Čelákovice. The hunt continues there.

His birth year is genuinely unsettled. His 1859 marriage record gives his age as 30, which points to about 1828/29. The 1870 census gives 32, pointing to about 1838, which is the year my book has always carried. I am showing you both, because that is what the records say, and picking one just to tidy the story would be inventing evidence. When his baptism surfaces, it will settle it.

One parent’s baptism held out the longest: Maria Žák’s. Josef’s turned up the same afternoon — Josef Lukáš Tarant, baptized 21 May 1801, in the very spread of the Čelákovice birth book an earlier read had called empty. Maria’s took one more pass through that same book — Marie Josefa Žáková, baptized 24 October 1797 — hiding under her full double name. This family’s names hide mid-sentence in long register entries, and we have learned to trust the parish index over a quick scan.

The vanishing

And then there is America, where the wall still stands.

Frank crossed the Atlantic sometime before 1870 — no passenger list has ever been found for him — and surfaced in Kewaunee County, Wisconsin, one of the great Bohemian settlements of the Midwest: Czech families had been arriving there since 1854, some five thousand strong by the 1880s, with their own Bohemian Hall raised in 1870, the very year Frank appears. Men of Frank’s generation had one more reason to cross: the Austrian Army’s long conscription, the same army whose permission he had once needed to marry. That is context, not proof — but it is the world he moved through.

In 1870 he is “Frank Trant,” and then the record simply stops. No 1880 census. No land, no naturalization, no probate, no grave that we have found. His family did not sail until 1888 — the ship Gellert, Hamburg to New York, August 15–28, 1888 — when the passenger list carries a Therese Tarant with Josef and little Frank, Josef’s son. Her age is written as 32; Theresia would have been about 52, and I have believed for years that a clerk’s 5 was misread as a 3. I still believe that is the best reading, but I hold it as a reading, not a fact. Eighteen years separate Frank’s Wisconsin appearance from his family’s crossing, and every explanation — he came ahead and died before they followed; he went back and forth; the family story compressed two journeys into one — is still on the table.

What we know is how Theresia ended: in 1910 she was living with Josef in Oregon Township, Starke County, Indiana, age 77 — and where the census asked her marital status, she said “Single.” Not widowed. Single. After all those years, that one word may be the most Frank ever told us about what happened — or it may just be a widow who no longer counted herself married. The record doesn’t say, and neither will I.

Josef’s road, and the “Unknowns”

Josef’s own American road is fully documented: Chicago by 1888, naturalized in Cook County on September 21, 1892, a mason; then Marathon, Wisconsin; then Starke County, Indiana. His wife Antonie (née Holem) crossed separately in 1892 on the Scandia — chain migration, one ticket at a time. Antonie died in Plymouth, Indiana, in 1927.

Josef died on November 2, 1928, at Logansport State Hospital in Indiana, where he had been a patient for his last fifteen months. His death certificate names the cause plainly: arteriosclerosis. It states no mental diagnosis, and I will not invent one for him. What that certificate does show is a row of “Unknowns” where his father’s name, his mother’s name, and his wife’s name should be — because the informant was not his family. It was the hospital: “LONGCLIFF HOSPITAL RECORDS.” The institution didn’t know who his people were. His family did. And now, a century later, so do we: his father was Frank Tarant of Čelákovice, his mother Theresia Bechyň of Sadská, and the paper trail runs unbroken from a Prague altar in 1859 to a hospital ledger in 1928.

Why Marie matters

This line comes down to me through Josef’s daughter, and her name is the thread I want to leave you with.

Marie Tarant (1896–1985), born in Marathon, Wisconsin, married James Madison Gilbert. Their son was Robert James Gilbert; his daughter is my mother, Nancy; and then there is me. Marie is my great-grandmother, and she is why this Bohemian soldier and his baker father are family and not just a puzzle.

And look at her name. Both of Josef’s grandmothers were Maries — Maria Žák of Čelákovice and Marie Charvát of Sadská. Marie Tarant carried their name to Wisconsin. My grandmother, Mildred Marie Gilbert, carried it too. And it is my own middle name too: Marie — “Coni Marie” is the name I sign my work with. Four generations of women, one name, handed down from two Bohemian villages I had never seen — until a register page in Prague gave them back to me.

Still hunting — maybe you hold a piece

• Frank’s baptism, in the ring of parishes around Čelákovice (the town book is ruled out, 1827–1839).
• The baptism of Kateřina, Jan the glazier’s wife (about 1778–1781) — her own page should settle how her maiden name was truly spelled; the registers write it two ways, and neither is proven yet.
• Frank’s army personnel sheet — the Grundbuchblatt — which would rest at the Kriegsarchiv in Vienna; his regiment is settled (the 23rd, Airoldi’s), and the sheet is the next military stone.
• Kewaunee County court and naturalization records, 1858–1950, at the UW–Green Bay Area Research Center — the likeliest place Frank’s American ending is written down.
• Josef’s Logansport admission index card, through the Indiana State Archives.

If you are a Tarant, a Bechyň, a Žák, or a Charvát descendant — or a Kewaunee Bohemian family with a Frank who vanishes from your tree around 1870 — I would love to hear from you.

Sources

We source everything. Every fact above traces to one of these:

1. Baptism of Josef Tarant, Sadská Roman Catholic birth register, Sadská 18 (births 1853–1858), image 131 — Státní oblastní archiv v Praze, eBadatelna: https://ebadatelna.soapraha.cz/d/11466/131
2. Marriage of Franz Tarant & Theresia Bechyň, Prague, St. Peter na Poříčí marriage register PE O10 (1851–1860), scan 199 — Archiv hlavního města Prahy: https://katalog.ahmp.cz/pragapublica/permalink?xid=5B9772F796794486937294FE1610CDED
3. Marriage of Jozef Tarant & Maria Žák, Čelákovice Roman Catholic marriage register, Čelákovice 17 (1821–1854), image 008 — SOA Praha, eBadatelna: https://ebadatelna.soapraha.cz/d/4731/8
4. Death certificate of Joseph Tarant, Indiana Death Certificates 1899–2011, Certificate No. 32979, Cass County (Logansport State Hospital, November 2, 1928).
5. 1870 U.S. Census, “Frank Trant,” Kewaunee, Kewaunee County, Wisconsin — NARA M593.
6. Ship Gellert, Hamburg departure August 15, 1888, New York arrival August 28, 1888 — Staatsarchiv Hamburg, 373-7 I, VIII A 1 Band 062 A, p. 1374; NARA M237, Roll 524, List 1179; also Leo Baca, Czech Immigration Passenger Lists, Vol. VII, p. 209.
7. Naturalization of Josef Tarant, Cook County, Illinois, September 21, 1892 — NARA M1285, Roll 170.
8. 1910 U.S. Census, Oregon Township, Starke County, Indiana (Josef’s household, incl. Theressa, age 77).
9. Ancestors of Coni Allen by Coni Dubois (2026) — the compiled family record this research started from.
10. Baptism of Marie Josefa Žáková (Frank’s mother), Čelákovice Roman Catholic birth register, Čelákovice 11, image 037 (printed p. 67) — SOA Praha, eBadatelna: https://ebadatelna.soapraha.cz/d/4725/37
11. Marriage of Jan Tarant & Kateřina, Čelákovice Roman Catholic marriage register, Čelákovice 15, image 009 (printed p. 13), 31 May 1797 — SOA Praha, eBadatelna: https://ebadatelna.soapraha.cz/d/4729/9
12. Čelákovice parish surname index — the Žák lines, Čelákovice 21, images 321–323 — SOA Praha, eBadatelna: https://ebadatelna.soapraha.cz/d/4735/322
13. Militär-Schematismus des österreichischen Kaiserthumes, 1858 and 1859 (Infantry Regiment 23: Inhaber Airoldi; recruiting district Lodi) — Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/jbc.bj.uj.edu.pl.NDIGCZAS016406_1859
14. Baptism of Veronika Žáková, Čelákovice parish register 13, p. 28, 6 January 1824. https://ebadatelna.soapraha.cz/d/4727/11

© 2026 Ever Widening Circle Research by Coni Dubois LLC. All rights reserved.