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Rawlins family traces roots into Czech Republic
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| This Oct. 14, 2009 photo shows Rawlins Mayor Ken Klouda and his wife Lynda, in Rawlins, Wyo.. The couple, along with other family members, recently made a trip to the Czech Republic to explore the Klouda family heritage. - By The Associated Press |
By JANICE KURBJUN, Rawlins Daily Times an AP Member Exchange
RAWLINS — Ken Klouda remembers thinking that finding the exact location of his family’s heritage seemed dubious.It was about a year ago, and his cousin Rebecca Getz had recently heard that a company, named P.A.T.H. Finders, had found not just the village, but also the house where their grandmother lived before immigrating as a newlywed to the United States in 1912.
He had always wondered where his family came from. He knew only that the Klouda name was Czech, and that his grandparents and a sibling had immigrated with a young child to homestead in Wyoming.
They settled in Red Mountain, 15 miles west of Tie Siding, and eventually moved to Laramie. There, the family grew, with more children and grandchildren, including Klouda.
But, to him, it was hardly believable that a small Czech company had used baptismal and marriage certificates to pinpoint a tiny village of 30 houses, named Rousmerov, and in it, a single home where his grandmother had lived.
For a fee, the couple that owns and operates P.A.T.H. Finders would take Rebecca and anyone else who wanted to go to the town, which is located near the border between the Bohemian and Moravian regions of the Czech Republic, Klouda said.
“They’ve been through two world wars and 50 years of communist occupation,” he said. “So they could take me out to a village with the right name and point at a house and say, that’s it. We could take the pictures and I’d bring them home and show my family.”
But that’s not how it turned out.
Last year, Getz and her husband met the P.A.T.H. Finders couple to travel to Rousmerov. There, they knocked on the door of a farmhouse with a network of additions tacked on.
A “little old lady,” as Klouda described, who was in her 80’s and named Bohumila Nevrklova, answered the door. She ushered the Getz couple inside to visit.
Nevrklova’s farm home belonged to her parents at the turn of the century. There, they befriended Klouda’s grandmother, who lived and worked in the house, and stayed in touch with her when she left for the United States.
“(Nevrklova) excused herself and went into her little bedroom and came out with a shoebox,” Klouda said.
He paused.
“She opened the shoebox and pulled out a (photo) and showed it to my cousin,” he said, asking if she knew the man pictured.
Klouda said his cousin looked at it and said, “That’s my great-grandfather.”
She pulled out another picture and showed it to Getz, he added, asking who the children were with the grandmother pictured.
The photo was of a barn west of Laramie, the “old Collegian dairy barn,” Klouda said.
It was where his family lived and worked when they sold the homestead in 1954. Two young boys stood next to the woman in the photo.
“That was my brother, and myself,” Klouda said. “It was the real deal.”
Ken Klouda has held captive an intense desire to learn about his family for more than a decade, though he said a vague wonder extends into his childhood.
In September 1988, he and Lynda Klouda traveled to Germany, where they planned to cross the border into Czechoslovakia to search for family heritage despite it being behind the Iron Curtain.
“Our German friends discouraged us,” Klouda said. “They said, ‘You won’t last. You won’t make it. Nobody will talk to you.”’
They didn’t go. Six to eight weeks later, the Berlin Wall came down.
“It’s always been my desire to go find out,” Klouda said. “We’ve been wanting to do this for a long time. And when my cousin paved the path for us off we went.”
It was emotional, Klouda said. He described standing at the doorstep of the rural, Czech farmhouse a year after his cousin’s initial contact. He was at the threshold of the “old country,” a place and time he didn’t know much about.
He and eight other Klouda family descendents decided to hop a plane last month to spend two weeks in the Czech Republic. They planned to spend a day tracing the trail established by their cousin.
On the fourth day of their visit, after getting their feet wet by touring Prague, they joined with the P.A.T.H. Finders couple and drove several hours southeast of the capital toward Rousmerov.
The only mental images Klouda had of the area were of photos his cousin snapped the year prior and an aerial photo from Google Earth.
The Kloudas — more of them this time — again knocked on Nevrklova’s door, aiming to hear the story with their own ears and see it with their own eyes. What they saw was a typical rural European town with stucco homes that had been added on to and remodeled several times.
The addresses, with so few of them, were “Rousmerov 13” or “Rousmerov 4.”
Sometime between 1912 and today, three new houses had been built, Klouda said.
“As I told my brother, this is where it all started,” he said. “This is where we came from.”
Nevrklova greeted the family and again invited them in this time for a lunch of pork schnitzel, farm potatoes and vegetables.
“For them to invite nine strangers into their home for lunch was amazing,” Klouda said.
During lunch, they compared notes. Klouda showed Nevrklova photos of Red Mountain, which she noted looked desolate compared to Rousmerov.
But Klouda said it wasn’t hard for her to believe they’d found a better life. She went around the table, asking about each family member’s occupation and where they lived a range that spread from coast to coast.
“She was very interested and curious in what happened to the family after they left. Where did the people go? What did they do? What have they become?” Klouda said. “She was pleased.”
Afterward, over fruit-filled pastries called kolatchkys that reminded Klouda and his brother of their grandmother, they walked around and talked about the family’s history in the tiny village.
His grandmother corresponded with the family for years while living in Laramie, Nevrklova said.
“Us kids didn’t know that,” Klouda said, but the woman had proof; she saved many of the letters.
During the walking tour of the village’s interwoven streets and expansive fields, the group of nine stumbled across something they never thought they would.
“Another little old lady came up to our group and started speaking with our guide,” Klouda said. “She had some documents with her. ... Her great-grandfather lived in the same house with my great-grandfather, had the same last name.”
The guide guessed that there was a 90 percent chance that the woman, named Jarmila Rousorva, was related to the family possibly a third cousin by marriage.
“I went over to her and took (the guide) with me and I kissed this lady on both cheeks and said, ‘Tell her, welcome to the family,”’ Klouda said.
She cried, he added, because she was so happy.
The visit didn’t satiate much for Klouda, though. All it did was encourage him, his brother and cousins to keep searching. They want to look deeper on their grandfather’s side, beyond the several villages they visited in the region, where they supposed he was a carriage driver before immigrating.
Klouda said he expects to go back to spend more time in the village, “just hanging around.”
Information from: Rawlins Daily Times, http://www.rawlinstimes.com
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