# Udraz, Písek, West Bohemia Udraz was a small village in the Písek district, tucked into the countryside along the Vltava. For the family that carried the Bartoš name to America, it marks a brief but pivotal chapter — the place where a marriage was made and a new household began. Anna Stará came from this corner of Bohemia, born on 10 June 1835 into a world of cottagers and hired laborers. Her father, Matěj Stará, was a *domkář* — a peasant cottager holding a modest house at Újezd number 29, in the neighboring Vltavotýn district of the Budějovice region. Her mother, Marie, was herself the daughter of a *podruh*, a landless laborer who worked and lived on another's holding. These were people at the lower rungs of rural society: they held little land, or none, and their labor was tied to the farms and cottages of others. It was among such families that Anna met Jakub Bartoš. He was a *pacholek* — a farm hand or horse groom — attached to nearby Nezdašov, and worked at Udraz as a *podruh*, a hired hind without a house of his own to his name here. Jakub was the son of František Bartoš, a *chalupník* (a small cottager) at Albrechtice house number 31, and Veronika, whose father Vít Bartuška farmed at Albrechtice number 12. Jakub's roots, like Anna's, lay in the villages of the Vltavotýn district just to the south. On 20 February 1860, Jakub and Anna married. Jakub was twenty-six, Anna thirty-two; both were Catholic, and both single. Although Udraz belonged to the parish of Albrechtice nad Vltavou, their marriage was recorded in the parish of Neznašov, just to the south — a reminder of how the working lives of a farm hand and a hind spread across village and parish lines, following the labor rather than a single home. The marriage did not keep them in Udraz for long. Their household settled at Nezdašov, where their daughter Maria was born on 4 May 1860, only months after the wedding, in house number 31. There Jakub is described as a *domkář* himself — a cottager with a small holding of his own, a step up from the hired man he had been at Udraz. A son, František (Frank Louis), followed on 2 August 1864, born at Nezdašov house number 3 and baptized the next day. Udraz, then, represents the family at a threshold. Anna Stará was born nearby in 1835; here she married in 1860; and within a few short years the family had gathered a modest cottage and two small children. That threshold opened outward. When Frank was only seven months old, the family left Bohemia and sailed for America, settling in Iowa. The laborers and cottagers of the Vltava country had reached the limit of what their small holdings could offer, and like many of their neighbors, they carried their name across the sea. For this family, Udraz is remembered not for its size but for what began there — a marriage in the winter of 1860 that set in motion the journey from a Bohemian cottage to the farmlands of the American Midwest.