Brick Wall Wednesday: The Wall Came Down Twice — Frank Tarant, Part 2

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.

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