Chapter One
The Old Country
In the autumn of 1870, in a small Roman Catholic parish nestled against the Carpathian foothills of northeastern Slovakia, a boy was baptized Andrej Zachariáš Jakovský. His village was called Šarišské Michaľany — Saint Michael's, in the old Hungarian tongue — a place of beech forests, rye fields, and wolves on the high ridges above.
Six years later, in a neighboring village called Šarišská Trstená, a girl was born into the Tresch family — Žofia Barbara Tresch. Her surname was Swiss-German in origin, carried into the Carpathians by settlers perhaps two centuries before. The name Barbara had passed through the Tresch women since at least 1739, when a burial record shows an infant daughter of one Joannis Georgÿ Drecsch and his wife Barbarae. A name handed down like a stone passed hand to hand across generations.
"They spoke Slovak at home, Hungarian on paper, and Latin in church. Three languages for one small life."
The Šariš region in the 1870s and 1880s was a place under pressure. The Austro-Hungarian Empire administered it on paper; landlords extracted what they could from peasant farmers; and the forests that had fed and sheltered villages for centuries were slowly being enclosed. Meanwhile, word was traveling east from the port cities — word of Pennsylvania, of coal, of wages that could buy a family out of debt in a single season.
The village of Šarišské Michaľany had perhaps three hundred souls. Šarišská Trstená had thirty-nine inhabitants recorded in 1880 — a number that would shrink further as the emigration wave took hold. By the time Andrew and Sophia left, entire village networks were relocating together, following kinship chains to the same Pennsylvania street corners.
Chapter Two
Hazleton, Pennsylvania
By 1893 they were in Hazleton, Pennsylvania — one of the anthracite coal towns of Luzerne County, boom-loud and dangerous and full of people who had traveled the same long road from the same Carpathian ridges. It was here, almost certainly at St. Joseph's Slovak Roman Catholic Church on North Laurel Street — the oldest Slovak Catholic parish in the Western Hemisphere, founded 1882 — that Andrew Zachary Jacowski and Sophia Barbara Tresch were married.
Their first child, John J. Jacowski, was born in Hazleton in 1894. Mary followed in 1895, and then Andrew Peter in 1897. Three children in three years, in a coal town where the Lattimer Massacre would kill nineteen unarmed Slovak miners just a few miles away in September of that year. Sophia would have been twenty-one, nursing a newborn, when the news came back to the neighborhood.
The Lattimer Massacre — September 10, 1897
A Luzerne County sheriff's posse opened fire on unarmed striking miners, killing nineteen — mostly Slovak, Polish, and Lithuanian immigrants. The Jacowski family was living in Hazleton at the time. This event, three miles from their home, helped galvanize labor organizing across the coalfields.
Chapter Three
The Road to Wisconsin
The family did not stay in Pennsylvania. By 1900 they were in Ohio, Stephen born there that year; by 1903 they were in Chicago, where twins Valentine and Michael arrived. Then, sometime before 1915, the final migration — northward, to Linwood, Wisconsin, in the lake country of Portage County.
Andrew Zachary Jacowski died on July 2, 1915, in Linwood, Wisconsin. He was forty-four years old. He was buried at Saint Patrick's Catholic Cemetery in Lanark, Portage County — a long way from the Carpathian beech forests where he had been baptized in November of 1870.
Sophia outlived him by eighteen years. She died on May 1, 1933, of a ruptured appendix, at St. Michael's Hospital — laid to rest beside her husband in Lanark. One of their sons, Father Michael Jacowski, would be ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1935, serving at Holy Rosary Parish in Kewaunee, Wisconsin. A boy from the Carpathians, one generation removed, taking orders in a Great Lakes diocese.
From the Stevens Point Journal, 1933
In Memoriam: Sophia Barbara Jacowski
Born May 7, 1876, in the Prešov area of Šariš County, Czechoslovakia. Emigrated to the United States, settling in Hazleton, Pennsylvania. Beloved wife of the late Andrew Zachary Jacowski. Survived by her children and grandchildren, and by her father, John Tresch Sr., still living in Czechoslovakia.
