# Neznašov Neznašov was a small Bohemian village in the district of Vltavotýn, within the Budějovice region of southern Bohemia. For the Bartoš family it was home, and it was the place they left behind. The family belonged to the village's Catholic parish, whose books recorded the births of the family's children. Jakub Bartoš raised his family in Neznašov's modest houses — house number 31 and later house number 3. He is described as a *domkár*, a cottager who owned little more than his dwelling and perhaps a small plot, one of the many rural families who lived by their own labor rather than by landholding of any substantial size. Jakub's own roots lay just beyond the village, in Albrechtice, where his father Frantiŝek Bartoš had been a *chalupník* — a smallholder — in house 31, and where his mother Veronika came from the family of Vít Bartuŝka, a *sedlák*, or established farmer, in house 12. His wife Anna came from Ujezd, the daughter of Matěj Starý, a cottager in house 29, and Marie of the Vavřesná family from Bohunice. These were the farming and cottaging families of a tight cluster of neighboring villages, bound together by marriage and by the parish that recorded them all. Two of Jakub and Anna's children carry the family's story out of Neznašov: - **Mary Bartosh** was born on 4 May 1860 in house number 31. - **Frank Louis Bartosh** was born on 2 August 1864 in house number 3 and baptized the following day. Frank's birth marks nearly the last chapter of the family's time in Bohemia. He was only about seven months old when the family emigrated, leaving the cottages of Neznašov for America and settling in Iowa. Whatever Neznašov had meant to Jakub and Anna — the houses they had lived in, the parish that had baptized their children, the neighboring villages that held their parents and grandparents — none of it would be part of their children's memory. Mary was still a small child at departure, and Frank never knew the place at all. For the generations that followed in Iowa and North Dakota, Neznašov became the origin point on the far side of the ocean: the village where the family began, recorded in a parish book and carried in name only.