# Bohemia In the rolling farmland of the Písek region of southern Bohemia, along the tributaries feeding the Vltava River, a cluster of small villages held the roots of the Bartos and Stara families through the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These were places of cottagers and farm laborers, where a family's standing was measured in the size of its holding and the number of the house it lived in. ## The Villages The family's world was bounded by a handful of neighboring settlements, all within the districts of Vltavotýn and Písek. In **Albrechtice nad Vltavou**, Frantisek Bartos was born in 1791 and Veronika Bartushka around 1803. Frantisek would become a *chalupník*, a small peasant cottager, living at house number 31, while Veronika was the daughter of Vitus Bartuska, a *sedlák* — a full farmer — of house number 12 in the same village. Their son **Jakub Bartos** was born in Albrechtice on 23 July 1834. To the south lay **Mala Strana**, where Matej Stara was born around 1784, and where his daughter **Anna Katharina Stara** was born on 5 February 1828. Matej was a *domkár*, a peasant cottager, later associated with house number 29 in nearby **Ujezd** (recorded as Aujezda or Auzeda), where he died in 1850. His wife, **Marie Vovesna**, was born about 1786 in **Bohanice**, the daughter of Josef Vovesna, a *podruh* — a landless hired hand. Anna Stara herself came from **Udraz**, a village within the parish of Albrechtice nad Vltavou. ## Marriage at Udraz On 20 February 1860, Jakub Bartos and Anna Katharina Stara married. He was 26, she was 32, both Catholic and both single. Jakub was working as a *pacholek* — a farm hand or horse groom — at Neznašov, and living as a *podruh*, a landless laborer, at Udraz, the bride's village. Although Udraz belonged to the parish of Albrechtice nad Vltavou, the marriage was recorded in the parish of Neznašov, just to the south. The gap in ages, and Jakub's status as a laborer without land of his own, tell something of life for those on the lower rungs of rural Bohemian society. Where a *sedlák* held a full farm and a *chalupník* held a cottage with a bit of ground, a *pacholek* and *podruh* worked and lived on the land of others, moving where labor was needed. ## Neznašov and the Children After their marriage, Jakub and Anna settled in **Neznašov**, where Jakub is recorded first as a *pacholek* and then as a *domkár* — a cottager — at house number 3. Their children were born there: - **Mary Bartosh**, born 4 May 1860 at house number 31. - **Frank Louis Bartosh**, born 2 August 1864 at house number 3 and baptized the following day. Frank was only seven months old when the family left Bohemia. In 1864 they emigrated to America, crossing the Atlantic and settling in Iowa. Their son **John Bartosh** was among the children of the marriage as well. For this family, the villages around Písek were the last chapter of a Bohemian story reaching back to Frantisek Bartos's birth in 1791. Within a generation of Jakub and Anna's marriage, the family that had spent decades as cottagers and laborers among Albrechtice, Ujezd, Bohanice, and Neznašov carried their name across the ocean, where Frank Louis Bartosh would live out his life in Iowa and later North Dakota, dying at Lisbon in 1919.