In May, my husband and I visited Prague and Vienna. I am still processing all I saw and learned. Over the next few months I’ll write a few posts about the experience.
We hired a Czech genealogist, Julius Müller, to take us to the area my grandmother lived as a girl in the late 19th Century, and about which she wrote when she lived in San Francisco in the 1950s. She wrote stories about the 1889 influenza epidemic, local events and festivals, and mentioned that she had written a few articles for her father Adolf Löwy’s weekly newspaper, the Biela-Zeitung.
Although I don’t speak German, over the past few years I have spent hours poring over online issues of the Biela-Zeitung. The Austrian National Library had digitized several years of the paper, and I had been able to look through the first 10 years of the paper since its first publication in 1874. My grandmother was born in 1886, and on our trip I wanted to look through issues from the years after her birth. I hoped to find information about family events and about things my grandmother had written. One morning, Julius took my husband and me to the Czech National Archives in Prague where he had reserved several volumes of the paper.
At the Czech National Library Archives in the outskirts of Prague.
Julius showed us how to identify death notices – they looked like advertisements, but were surrounded by a plain black border. One of the first things he found in the 1902 edition of the paper was a notice of Helene’s sister Ida’s death in 1902:
From supplement to Biela-Zeitung 1 January 1902 issue. From the Czech National Library Archives
As publisher of the paper, Adolf probably didn’t have to worry about the cost of taking out a notice other than lost advertising revenue. He printed a full-page notice, which seemed to emphasize what a tragedy it was for the family.
The notice translates:
Anyone who has suffered a similar fate in their life as we have will understand our deep and justified pain over the unexpected and unfortunately all too early passing of our beloved good wife, mother, daughter and sister, Mrs
Ida Zrzawy, née Löwy
Engineer’s wife in Brüx
and will feel and understand the pain and sorrow that comes, along with the inability to adequately thank everyone for the expressions of heartfelt sympathy from so many through verbal and written condolences and accompaniment to the grave….
Many thanks
The deeply grieving Zrzawy-Löwy family
My grandmother wrote a story called “Dandelions in May 1902” where she told the story of the upheaval Ida’s death caused the family. Everything changed from that moment. Helene’s mother Rosa moved in with Ida’s husband and their 4 children, all under the age of 8. Her sister Mathilde also moved there to help with the family, ultimately marrying the widower a year later. Helene was the only family member still home with Adolf. In addition to his grief, he was left managing the business side of his printing and publishing enterprise (which Rosa had done) as well as continuing writing and publishing of the paper. Helene wrote that her father seemed to age overnight.
Reading Ida’s obituary, printed evidence of my family’s trauma, confirmed what I knew in an intimate, immediate, and personal way.
During our day at the Czech archive, we were not able to look through all the volumes Julius had reserved, but I knew we could do the same at the Austrian National Library in Vienna the following week. I wrote to make arrangements to visit the library and reserve the volumes I still wanted to review. To my delight, the librarian told me that more volumes of the Biela-Zeitung had been digitized up to 1898 so I only needed to look at a few later volumes, knowing I could look online at home.
I enjoy being able to look at digital editions because the technology is so good that I can search for a word or name and get results. However, there was something special about seeing and touching the paper that my great-grandfather published and my grandmother read.
The first thing I did when I got home from our trip was to download the additional volumes that had been digitized. I then searched for “Helene” in the 1886 volume, even though I didn’t recall seeing birth announcements when I had looked through the newspaper before (not that I would know what to look for). Imagine my delight when I found the following in the November 27, 1886 edition, 4 days after my grandmother was born:
From the Austrian National Library digital archives of the Biela-Zeitung.
Church News:
Born:
…Helene, daughter of Adolf Löwy, Bookseller
And so the story begins!