A Family Chronicle
Before we were Jacowski, we were
Džakovský
One Slovak family from a small Šariš village in the shadow of the Carpathians — rye fields, beech woods, and the long road across an ocean that brought them here.
Section One
The Name
Start here, because everything else is a consequence of it. The surname we carry today — Jacowski — is not the name the family carried for most of its history. The name they carried was Džakovský, and the first time we can find it written down is the summer of 1756, when a Franciscan priest heard the family say it themselves and rendered its Slovak sound in Latin letters — Dzjacovsky.
The sound was always the same — something close to DZHAH-kov-skee, three syllables opening with the soft Dž- cluster that Slovak speakers pronounce naturally, but English speakers struggle with. The spelling was what kept changing.
A Hungarian official in 1875 wrote Dzákovszky. A Slovak priest in Pennsylvania in 1894 wrote Djacovsky. A German clerk at the port of Hamburg in 1887 wrote Jacowsky. An American county registrar in Hazleton wrote Jacowski. All five men were writing the same name. None of them consulted the family. None of them agreed.
By the time the paperwork reached Wisconsin in 1915, the family had been Jacowski for a generation. The D was gone. The Slovak -ský had become the Polish -owski. The diacritics were gone. What remained was a tidy Polish-looking surname — for a Slovak family that had never been Polish — rooted in a Slovak village that had never been part of Poland.
That’s how our name used to be spelled.
Five spellings, one name
Each row is a different person holding a pen. They all heard the same syllables. They all wrote them down differently.
- Dzjacovsky1756
Father Bonaventura, OFM Conv. · Šarišské Michaľany Latin register
The oldest known spelling. Written twice on the same page as Dzjacovsky and Dzjacsovski — the priest heard the same sound and reached for it twice. The D is authentic, not a later accretion.
- Dzákovszky1875
Hungarian state register · Sabinov (Kis-Szeben) R.C. parish
The Magyarized official form. Entry 115 of the Sabinov baptism register — father Andr. Dzákovszky, house no. 267. Five years after Andrew was born four kilometers away.
- Djacovsky1894
Slovak priest · St. Joseph's, Hazleton PA
How a Slovak priest in Pennsylvania spelled the same sound coming out of Andrew's mouth. Closer to the speech than any of the official forms.
- Jacowsky1887
German shipping clerk · SS Werra manifest, Hamburg
Andrew's first entry into Western paperwork. The D is gone. A German clerk heard "Yah-koff-ski" and rendered it in the only convention he knew.
- Jacowski1893–now
American county clerks · Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin
The settled American form. Hazleton was a Polish coal town. American clerks used the familiar -owski ending for any Slavic name ending in -sky. The spelling stuck. The sound barely changed.
Why the D disappeared
Hazleton in the 1890s was a Polish coal town. When a Slovak family arrived with a name that opened with a Dz- cluster and ended in a Slavic -sky, American clerks reached for the spelling convention they already knew. The Polish -owski ending was familiar. The Slovak -ský was not. The Hungarian -szky was not. The D at the front was not.
So in one generation the name lost its D, traded its Slovak tail for a Polish one, and settled into Jacowski. For a hundred and twenty years the family carried a spelling that described a people they were not — and forgot the one that described who they had been.
Section Two
A Name, Written Down, in 1756
In April 2026, on folio 151 of the Latin baptismal register of Šarišské Michaľany, we found the oldest confirmed appearance of the family: a man named Martinus Dzjacovsky, his wife Anna, and their newborn son Joannes.
The register was kept by Father Bonaventura, a Franciscan priest of the Order of Friars Minor Conventual, who served as chaplain to Count Thomas Szirmay the Younger — a major Hungarian noble whose estates encompassed the village and its neighbors. Father Bonaventura wrote in Latin, in a careful clerical hand, and he recorded the surname twice on the same page.
The first time, for the baptism of Martinus’s son on 30 May, he wrote Dzjacovsky. Ten weeks later, when Martinus stood as godfather to another child in the village, the priest wrote Dzjacsovski. Two spellings, one man, one afternoon. Both clearly rendering the same Slavic Dz- cluster in Latin letters. The D was no accident.
Folio 151 · 30 May 1756
Anno 1756 — Sequentes Szent Mihalienses Baptizati Sunt per R. P. Bonaventuram Ordinis Minorum Conventualium Capellanum Ill.mi D. Comitis Thomæ Szirmay Junioris.
BaptizedJoannes — son of Martinus Dzjacovsky and Anna.
GodparentsStephanus Brydos · Eva Mikulasova
VillageSzent Mihály (Šarišské Michaľany)
Ten weeks later, on 12 August 1756, Martinus appears again — this time as godfather to Elizabetha, daughter of Michael Sapara. That his neighbors chose him to stand for their child confirms he was an established, trusted member of the village.
What this tells us
Andrew Zachary was born in this same village one hundred and fourteen years after Martinus’s son was baptized there. Between them sits four or five generations of Džakovský men — a continuous presence in one Slovak village for more than a century. The generational arithmetic is consistent with direct descent, though the generations between Martinus and Andrew’s grandfather remain unfilled.
The same folio contains a baptism from Jakabfalven — the Hungarian name for Jakubovany, the neighboring village — recorded under the same parish, the same priest, the same manorial administration. When we later find Galajda and Mikita families from Jakubovany standing as godparents to a Dzákovszky child in 1875, the connection is not coincidence. It is the same small world, still in motion, still recognizably itself, after a hundred and twenty years.
Section Three
Andrew Zachary
Andrej Zachariáš Dzákovszky
11 November 1870 · Šarišské Michaľany, Slovakia
2 July 1915 · Linwood, Portage County, Wisconsin
Džakovský
Šarišské Michaľany · b. 1870
Andrew was born in the late autumn of 1870 in a village of perhaps three hundred souls, wedged against the Carpathian foothills fifteen kilometers north of Prešov. His parents — Joannes Dzákovszky and Julianna, whose maiden name we still do not have — were Slovak Roman Catholics, confirmed by his 1915 Wisconsin death certificate, where the names survived in the clerk’s Americanized rendering as John and Julia. His world was rye fields, beech forests, and wolves on the high ridges. His languages, in order of use: Slovak at home, Hungarian on paper, Latin in church.
At seventeen he left it.
The crossing — April 1887
The ship was the SS Werra. She sailed from Hamburg, arrived at Castle Garden in New York, and carried a seventeen-year-old boy whose name was written on the manifest as Andras Jacowsky — the first time it appeared in a Western alphabet, and the first time it appeared without its D. A German shipping clerk had heard the sound and rendered it in German phonetic convention. By the time the Werra docked, the paper said Jacowsky. Andrew almost certainly never saw it written down.
He was not alone on the manifest. The lines above and below his were filled with other young men from the same Šariš County — Gregorsky, Ellichalik, Šalaj, Hudak — all headed for the same anthracite coal towns of Pennsylvania. Entire village networks were relocating together.
Hazleton, 1887–1897
He spent six years in Hazleton before Sophia crossed. What he did in those six years is undocumented, but the answer is almost certainly coal — the anthracite mines of Luzerne County were the reason Šariš men came, and they were where Šariš men went. On 8 April 1893, at St. Gabriel’s Roman Catholic Church in Hazleton, Andrew married Sophia Barbara Tresch. Marriage license no. 13,136, Luzerne County, witnesses Michael Cornish and a Maria whose surname has not survived the handwriting.
Their children came fast. John in 1894, Mary in 1895, Andrew Peter in 1897. Sophia was twenty-one that September when the Lattimer Massacre killed nineteen unarmed striking miners three miles from their home — mostly Slovak, Polish, and Lithuanian men. She was nursing a newborn.
Ohio, Chicago, Wisconsin
They did not stay. By 1900 the family was in Ohio, where Stephen was born. By 1903 they were in Chicago, where twins Valentine and Michael arrived. Sometime before 1915 they made the final migration northward to Linwood, Wisconsin, in the lake country of Portage County — far from the coal, close to farmland.
Andrew died there on 2 July 1915, aged forty-four. He is buried at Saint Patrick’s Catholic Cemetery in Lanark, Portage County — a long way from the Carpathian beech forests.
Section Four
Sophia Barbara
Žofia Barbara Tresch
7 May 1876 · Šariš County, Slovakia
1 May 1933 · Stevens Point, Wisconsin
Tresch
Šariš County · b. 1876
Sophia Barbara Tresch was born in the Prešov region of Šariš County, Slovakia, on the 7th of May 1876 — probably in the small village of Šarišská Trstená, though the specific parish has never been confirmed. She was the daughter of John Tresch Sr., a man who was still living in Czechoslovakia at the time of her own death in 1933.
The Tresch surname itself is unusual for the region — Swiss-German in origin, carried into the Carpathians perhaps two centuries before Sophia was born by settlers we cannot yet trace. A 1739 burial entry from the Šariš region records an infant daughter of Joannis Georgÿ Drecsch and his wife Barbarae — the same surname variant, the same region, the same recurring given name that Sophia would carry as her middle name a century and a half later. Whether that is our line remains unproven, but the thread is striking.
She crossed the Atlantic in 1893, the same year Andrew married her in Hazleton. Whether they had been betrothed before he left the old country, or whether the match was made through the tight kinship network of Šariš emigrants already settled in Hazleton, we do not know.
Stevens Point Journal · Saturday, 6 May 1933
“Mrs. Sophia Jacowski, a resident of the town of Lanark for the past 21 years, died at 11:15 o’clock Friday night at St. Michael’s Hospital. She had been ailing during the past winter, was taken sick ten days ago, and underwent an operation for ruptured appendix Wednesday.
Mrs. Jacowski was born at Prešov, Šarišská county, Czechoslovakia and came to this country in 1893. Her maiden name was Sophia Barbara Tresch…”
The obituary lists five sons and one daughter surviving her, and one daughter — Mrs. Paul Benne — who had died in Chicago four years earlier. Interment was at St. Patrick’s, beside Andrew.
Section Five
Seven Children, Three States
The geography of Andrew and Sophia’s children reads like a migration route. Three born in Hazleton. One in Ohio. Three in Chicago. Each birthplace marks where the family was trying to make a living that year.
- 1
John J.
26 April 1894Hazleton, Pennsylvania
First child. Later married Edwina M. Krueger.
- 2
Mary
5 October 1895Hazleton, Pennsylvania
Married Paul Benne, 1912. Died Chicago, 1928. Buried Holy Sepulchre, Alsip IL.
- 3
Andrew Peter
3 May 1897Hazleton, Pennsylvania
Lattimer Massacre year. WWI draft registration in Portage County WI, 1918.
- 4
Stephen
1900Ohio
The Ohio child. Born during the family's brief stay between Pennsylvania and Chicago.
- 5
Valentine R.
1903Chicago
Twin with Michael.
- 6
Rev. Michael
1903Chicago
Twin with Valentine. Ordained Roman Catholic priest, 1935. Served at Holy Rosary Parish, Kewaunee, Wisconsin. Buried there.
- 7
Sophia L.
1913Chicago
Youngest. Later Thompson.
A sister record
The Sabinov entry of December 1875
Five years after Andrew was born, and four kilometers from his village, the Sabinov baptism register recorded another child — a boy also called Andreas, born to a father also called Andreas Dzákovszky. The child died at three. With Andrew’s parents now confirmed as Joannes and Julianna, this Andreas of Sabinov cannot be Andrew’s father, but he is almost certainly a close relative — most plausibly an older brother or a cousin of Joannes. Which of the two, we do not yet know.
Sabinov R.C. Register · Entry 115 · 3–4 December 1875
- Child
- Andreas Dzákovszky — male, legitimate
- Father
- Andr. Dzákovszky — R.C. — house no. 267
- Mother
- Barbara Focefcsik — R.C.
- Godfather
- Andreas Galajda — R.C.
- Godmother
- Maria Mikita — R.C.
The godparent families are the proof of rootedness. Galajda appears in the 1715 census of Jakubovany — the neighboring village — as a founding household. Mikita appears in the Sabinov register continuously from at least 1765. For a Džakovský family to choose godparents from the oldest social fabric of the Sabinov micro-region is evidence they belonged to it. They were not newcomers.
Section Six
The Archive Mailbag
This is a working project, not a finished one. Five archives, four countries, and a handful of outstanding requests. Everything below is either waiting for a response or already delivered.
Štátny archív v Prešove
archiv.po@minv.sk
The archive replied on 29 April 2026 — approving a search of the 18th-century Šarišské Michaľany registers (Martinus's marriage and baptism), declining the broader 19th-century sweep due to a six-month backlog. Two follow-up letters were sent the same day in formal Slovak: Andrew's 1870 baptismal entry, and the marriage of his parents Joannes and Julianna (~1855–1868). €100 cap on each. Findings and invoice now awaited.
Portage County Register of Deeds
Cynthia A. Wisinski
registerofdeeds@co.portage.wi.gov
Andrew Zachary Jacowski's 1915 Wisconsin death certificate, received April 2026. Names his parents — in the clerk's Americanized rendering — as John and Julia: the Latin Joannes and Julianna of the parish registers.
Wisconsin Vital Records
dhsvitalrecords@wisconsin.gov
Parallel request for the same 1915 death certificate. Satisfied by the Portage County response.
Diocese of Green Bay Archives
archives@gbdioc.org
Clergy file for Rev. Michael Jacowski (b. 1903, ordained 1935, Holy Rosary Parish Kewaunee). Ordination files often list parents' birthplaces.
NEPA Genealogical Society
Sara Klinges
nepgsmail@gmail.com
Hazleton parish and civil records — marriage license, St. Gabriel's Latin register, and all three St. Joseph's baptism records for John, Mary, and Andrew Peter. Surname in every Hazleton parish record: Djacovsky.
Section Seven
What Remains Unknown
The honest inventory. Seven open questions, in the order they matter most. Each is a door we can see but have not yet been able to open.
Open question 01
The marriage of Martinus Dzjacovsky
Almost certainly in the 1740s or early 1750s in Šarišské Michaľany. The baptism register shows him already married to Anna by 1756, but the corresponding marriage register for those years has not been located.
Open question 02
The baptism of Martinus Dzjacovsky himself
Likely somewhere between 1715 and 1735, in or near Šarišské Michaľany. One generation further back would take us to the grandparents who settled the name in that village — if, indeed, they were the ones who settled it there.
Open question 03
The generations between Martinus (1756) and Joannes (mid-1800s)
Three or four generations of Džakovský men still unfilled between the 1756 baptism and the birth of Andrew's father Joannes. The 1875 Sabinov entry names a contemporary — Andr. Dzákovszky of house no. 267 — most likely a brother or cousin of Joannes rather than someone in the direct line. The Prešov archive is our best path back.
Open question 04
Julianna's maiden name
Andrew's mother is named on his 1915 Wisconsin death certificate only as Julia — the clerk's rendering of the Slovak Julianna. Her maiden name, and the parents who gave it to her, are the most consequential single fact still missing. The marriage record of Joannes and Julianna, somewhere between roughly 1855 and 1868, is the document that would supply it; a request for it is currently with the Prešov archive.
Open question 05
The baptism of Joannes Dzákovszky himself
Andrew's father was almost certainly born somewhere between 1830 and 1845, in or near Šarišské Michaľany. His baptism record would name his own parents — the missing rung between Martinus's descendants and the generation that produced Andrew. It is likely on an unindexed page of film 004407849, but has not yet been located.
Open question 06
Sophia's specific village
Her 1933 obituary names only "Prešov, Šarišská county." Šarišská Trstená is the best-supported candidate from parish geography but has not been confirmed by primary source. Her own baptism record at the Veľký Šariš register (film 1793684) remains unchecked.
Open question 07
Why the family left in the first place
Coal, probably. Debt, probably. Chain migration from Šariš to Hazleton was in full flow by the late 1880s, and seventeen-year-old farm boys were the first wave. But nothing specific to Andrew's motivation has survived.
Section Eight
Jakubovany
Four kilometers north of Sabinov, on a small stream that empties into the Torysa, sits a village whose own name may be the key to ours. Jakubovany — in Latin Terra Iacobi, in medieval Hungarian Jakabfalven. The Land of Jacob. Jacob’s village.
The village was founded in the 13th century by a settler named Jakub Poliak — Jakub being the Slovak form of Jacob, Poliak meaning the Pole. The settlement was named after him. It has been named after him ever since, in every language that has tried to render it: Terra Iacobi in Latin, Léngyelicabfalva in early Hungarian, Jakabfalven in later Hungarian, Jakubovany in Slovak. The naming convention is fixed. The place belongs to Jakub.
Our surname carries the same root. Džakovský opens with the palatalized Dz- cluster that Slovak speakers produce from the consonant softening of J- before certain vowels, and closes with -ovský — of, from, belonging to. Stack the two and the surname resolves to something very close to of Jakub’s place. The same Jakub. Probably the same place.
That would be a neat etymological coincidence by itself. It stops being a coincidence once you see how many other threads from the 1756 register, the 1875 register, and the village’s own history run through the same four square kilometers of the upper Torysa valley.
The reading
Jakubovany is the most plausible origin village for the Džakovský surname itself. It may, quite literally, be the place the name describes.
What follows is the evidence — seven threads, none conclusive on its own, all pointing in the same direction.
Seven threads, one valley
Etymology, landlord, watershed, shared families, parish, scale. Each would be circumstantial alone. Read together, they describe a single world.
- Etymology
The name describes the place
The village’s founding names all trace to one man: Jakub Poliak — Jakub being the Slovak form of Jacob, Poliak meaning the Pole. In Latin charters the settlement was Terra Iacobi, the Land of Jacob. By 1410 the Hungarians were calling it Léngyelicabfalva — roughly Polish-Jacob’s village. Džakovský / Dzjacovsky carries the same root — Džak- / Dzjak- from Jakub, the suffix -ovský meaning of or from. The surname can be read, quite literally, as of Jakub’s place.
- Land ownership
Sabinov bought the estate in the 16th century
The town of Sabinov purchased part of Jakubovany in the 1500s and remained its landlord until the abolition of serfdom. Every family living in Jakubovany paid dues to Sabinov. This is the administrative spine of the whole cluster where the Džakovský surname keeps turning up: Andreas Dzákovszky at Sabinov house 267 in 1875, Martinus Dzjacovsky in neighboring Šarišské Michaľany in 1756. Not random migrations — movement along a single manorial network centered on Sabinov.
- Geography
The Jakuboviansky stream, and Orkucany
The Jakuboviansky stream rises above the village and flows south into the Torysa at Orkucany — the same village that appears in our 1757 register as ex Orkuta. That small geographic detail places Father Bonaventura’s parish directly on Jakubovany’s own watershed. He was baptizing children up and down a single small valley.
- Shared families
The Revák family, in two registers, one generation apart
Jakubovany’s own history names the Revákovci among the wealthiest families in the village — wealthy enough to build a small manor house. In our 1756 Šarišské Michaľany register, on 5 August, a man named Stephanus Revak appears as a parent. Same rare surname, same era, neighboring villages. Almost certainly the same extended family spread across the valley.
- Shared families
Galajda and Mikita as godparents in 1875
The Galajdovci are a founding-lore family of Jakubovany — their name is woven into the village’s oldest oral history. In the 1875 Sabinov register, when Andreas Dzákovszky’s child is baptized, the godparents are a Galajda and a Mikita — both Jakubovany names. Godparents are chosen from trusted kin. The valley was still one world, a hundred and twenty years after Martinus.
- Parish
The Roman Catholic church of St. Lawrence
Jakubovany’s parish church, dedicated to St. Lawrence, underwent its largest repair in 1716 — forty years before Martinus Dzjacovsky is recorded in the same Franciscan ministry at Šarišské Michaľany. If the family originated in Jakubovany, they were parishioners of that church through its restoration, and Martinus’s parents or grandparents would have helped pay for it.
- Scale
A village of 543 people in 71 houses
In 1787 Jakubovany had 543 inhabitants across 71 houses. A community that small is not anonymous. Every family knew every other. A surname that literally means of Jakub’s place, carried by families appearing in the neighboring parish registers and eventually settling four kilometers away in Sabinov — that is exactly the pattern a family of Jakubovany origin would leave behind as it diffused outward over generations.
What we still do not have
A Džakovský baptism, marriage, or burial recorded in the Jakubovany parish itself. Without that single primary-source line, this remains a hypothesis — a strong one, but a hypothesis. The Jakubovany registers prior to the 19th century are held at the Prešov state archive and have not yet been searched for our surname.
That search is the next step. If a Džakovský entry exists on a folio of the Jakubovany parish register — a 17th-century baptism, a godfather line, a burial — it would close the loop between the name and the village the name describes. Until then, the evidence is convergent but incomplete. Which is, in its own way, honest: this is where the trail leads, and this is how far we have been able to follow it.
Terra Iacobi
The Land of Jacob. A village of 71 houses on a stream that flows into the Torysa. The most likely home of our name.
Section Nine
And beyond the village —
what of Jakub himself?
If Jakubovany is the village the name describes, a further question asks itself whether we want it asked or not: are we descended, by blood, from Jakub Poliak?
A thirteenth-century founder’s village was a small, concentrated world. Seventy-one houses by the 1787 census, almost certainly fewer in its first centuries. On a frontier where sparse settlers shared land, married the children of their neighbors, and passed farms down through tight local kin, the founder’s blood diffuses quickly. Within five or six generations of Jakub’s arrival, his line would have been running through most of the village. A family that later took the name of Jakub’s place would, on pure probability, have been carrying him too.
He was not a king. He was a Polish settler on the Hungarian frontier who received a charter, cleared a stretch of forest above the Torysa, built a household, and gave his name to the land that held it. The kind of man history usually forgets. But in the thirteenth century, when the Kingdom of Hungary was deliberately importing settlers from Poland and Germany to fill its northern marches, men like Jakub founded nearly every village in these hills. The paperwork calls them scultetus or locator — the man who arrived first, held the charter, and anchored the bloodline of the place for the next five centuries.
We cannot prove the descent. Six hundred years is a long time. The Black Death came through Šariš in the 1340s and may have cut lineages to the root. Outsiders married in, and more than one Jakub has walked through that village since. Without Y-DNA testing or pre-1400 parish records, the question resists closure.
But it is not an absurd question. It is what the name itself asks of us, quietly, every time we say it — whose Jakub? And the only Jakub the village was ever named after is the Pole who arrived in the 1200s with a charter, a household, and a line that we may, in some attenuated but recognizable way, still be the tail-end of.
Jakub Poliak
Jakub the Pole. Thirteenth century. Founder of Terra Iacobi — from whom, perhaps, we still come.
A note on identity
Slovak, not Hungarian.
Slovak, not Polish.
Every American document from the 1890s records Andrew and Sophia as Hungarian. This is a fact about paperwork, not a fact about people. Slovakia was under Hungarian political control for roughly a thousand years — from the Magyar conquest around 895 AD through the collapse of Austria-Hungary in 1918. Before that, the territory was the heartland of Great Moravia, the first major Slavic state, where Saints Cyril and Methodius brought Christianity in 863 AD.
The family spoke Slovak at home. They worshipped as Roman Catholics — not Greek Catholic like their Rusyn neighbors a few villages over, not Orthodox like their Ukrainian neighbors further east. They baptized their children at St. Joseph’s Slovak Roman Catholic Church in Hazleton, the oldest Slovak Catholic parish in the Western Hemisphere, founded in 1882 specifically to serve Slovak immigrants like them.
The surname looks Polish. It was not. The Polish -owski ending was a spelling convention American clerks reached for when they heard any Slavic name ending in -sky. Hazleton was a Polish coal town. Polish was the familiar template. So the Slovak -ský became Polish -owski, and the Slovak Dž- collapsed into J-, and a Slovak Roman Catholic family walked out of the courthouse in Luzerne County with a Polish-looking surname they would carry for four generations.
They were Slovak peasants from a small Šariš village who carried their name unchanged through at least three centuries in the same valley, before one of their seventeen-year-old sons boarded a steamship in Hamburg in April of 1887.
Džakovský
That is the name we came from.