The Wall Kept Falling — Frank Tarant, Found (A Brick Wall Wednesday Follow-Up)

By Coni Dubois

This morning I published the story of the night the wall came down on Frank Tarant — my great-great-grandfather who vanished after one census line in Wisconsin in 1870, leaving no parents, no baptism, no grave.

I told you in that post that his baptism was not in Čelákovice, the town his marriage record names as his birthplace. I told you his birth year was unsettled. Both of those things were true when I wrote them.

They are not true anymore. The wall kept falling.

Hours after the post went up, we went back into the Čelákovice birth register — the same book, read a second time with new eyes — and there he was, spelled the way the clerk heard it that day: Tarand.

František Salesius Tarand, baptized 29 January 1829, at house No. 33 — legitimate son of Josef Tarand, master baker, and Maria, daughter of Antonín Žák, master soap-boiler, of house No. 18.

House No. 33 is the very house his 1859 Prague marriage record gives as his birthplace. And the age fits to the week: he turned 30 three weeks before his wedding, exactly what the marriage clerk wrote. The 1838 birth year my book has carried for years came from a single census line — and that line was wrong. Frank was born in 1829.

The same book held a sorrow first. Fifteen months before Frank, his parents baptized another son and gave him the same name: František, baptized 4 October 1827. The parish index carries the rest of his story in one small column — he died 5 October 1827, one day old. When their next son came, Josef and Maria gave him their lost boy’s name again, with Salesius added to it. That was Frank.

And the finds didn’t stop with Frank. His father’s own baptism surfaced in the older register: Josef Lukáš Tarant, born 21 May 1801, son of Jan Tarand, a master glazier, and Kateřina Sobolová. From Jan the glazier the line steps back to Jan the weaver, born 1752 — and then to the furthest Tarant we have yet found in Čelákovice: Václav Tarant, born about 1715, who died there in 1782. Two hundred and fourteen years before Frank’s great-granddaughter would come looking for him.

I am correcting this morning’s post in place, and I’m leaving this follow-up standing beside it, because this is how the work really goes: you publish what the records prove today, and tomorrow the records prove a little more. The wall doesn’t always fall all at once. Sometimes it falls on a Wednesday — and then keeps falling.

The records (proof, as always):

• Baptism of František Salesius Tarand (Frank Tarant), Čelákovice, 29 Jan 1829 — Čelákovice 13, image 038: https://ebadatelna.soapraha.cz/d/4727/38
• Baptism of his brother František, Čelákovice, 4 Oct 1827 — Čelákovice 13, image 030: https://ebadatelna.soapraha.cz/d/4727/30
• Čelákovice parish index, Tarant lines (the 1827 death, 5 Oct 1827; the family lines): https://ebadatelna.soapraha.cz/d/4735/289
• Baptism of Josef Lukáš Tarant, Čelákovice, 21 May 1801 — Čelákovice 11, image 046: https://ebadatelna.soapraha.cz/d/4725/46

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