Searching for roots during a major life change

How Ancestry DNA and old-fashioned genealogy led me to Maria Obrdlíková

Photo by William Topa on Unsplash

One of my Christmas presents last year was an Ancestry DNA test. My mother-in-law could not have known how relevant that gift would be to my transition away from academia (if you are reading, thank you!). It began as an idle interest that I thought could spark some essay ideas. But now that I have begun building a family tree in earnest, I have come to see genealogy as one of those rituals I wrote about back in April that helps me navigate a major life transition more mindfully. 

What do you do when you give up a core marker of identity? Go back to your roots and rebuild that story of self. 

But it’s a tangled story. And genealogy can be the driest toast there is. My father read a Bible chapter before every meal (thousands of meals), and I have vivid memories of staring at dinner rolls slowly losing their heat while listening to long lists of begats which meant nothing to me. 

So I shall try to not inflict the same on you. 

I am preparing for a trip to Prague, where I will participate in a writing workshop and take a pilgrimage to an ancestral village in southern Moravia. I’ll write about this journey over the next month or so. Today I want to introduce you to one of my ancestors whose life story, so far as I grasp it, feels like an anchor to me now.

She was born on July 16, 1822, in Kněžice, Moravia. Exactly two hundred years ago. Her name was Maria (Mary) Obrdlíková. And if she hadn’t lost her first husband and married his cousin, I would not exist. 

I knew none of this when I sent in my DNA kit after Christmas. I expected that the results would include some Czech, German, and Swedish. But I was also certain that I’d see some evidence of indigenous ancestry in North America. Both sides of my family claimed Native American roots. These were vague rumors tied to great grandmothers (a white person cliché, it turns out) who I suppose looked vaguely Native American by the time they reached their 70s. My father’s side was supposed to have Sioux roots by way of North Dakota. And my mother’s side claimed to be Cherokee by way of Georgia. 

Here is what the DNA test revealed:

The upshot? I’m pretty much as white as it gets. 

The image and percentages above are misleading. You’d think that a DNA test would be an exact science, but it’s far from that. Companies like Ancestry rely on both the test tube and a larger database that includes a lot of unreliable self-reporting from other people. The maddening thing? That color-coded map has changed every time I’ve looked at it, because more DNA samples keep coming in and my sample keeps getting reshuffled within the larger data pool.

I know that I am 25% Czech and that these roots go back to southern Moravia. And I know that I am equal parts German and Swedish (roughly 12% each). So that accounts for half. Siblings do not inherit family DNA equally, which means that one of my children could have more Italian DNA from my wife than a sibling who inherited more Czech DNA from me (put that in your pipe and smoke it). But I do not believe that I somehow inherited so much Irish DNA that Irish is now the top indicator of my ethnicity. 

The fact that there is more genetic variation within ethnic groups than between them also renders some of the percentages in my DNA story impenetrably unreliable. According to the Human Genome Project, all humans are 99.9% identical at the DNA level. Distinctions between similar groups, like those in northern Europe, are harder to parse. As I learned from those who replied to an earlier draft of this essay, many companies do not contain enough samples from Native Americans for indigenous ancestry to even appear in results, and so I cannot say one way or another without further digging whether the rumors about great grandmothers are true (though it’s a pervasive enough falsehood that I’m assuming not). Perhaps most importantly, I cannot rely on the DNA results to draw any meaningful conclusions about cultural heritage. 

This is all a mess to unravel. Getting the birth dates and death dates and marriage records straight is hard enough. But telling an accurate story about those things is even harder. Mark Twain once joked about reaching the age when the only things he remembered had never happened at all, and there is a great deal of that in family lore. I owe much of what I know about my Czech origins to the hard work of Mary Šrámek Levesque, a genealogist who has generously pored over handwritten birth records and census reports to help me flesh out my Czech side.

So back to Maria Obrdlíková. She was born in Kněžice, which is easily found on Google Maps. 

Google Earth gives me a sense of the place. And while some of the landscape might have changed since 1822, many of the properties and fields in these villages remain much as they were two hundred years ago. A lot of farmland and a little forest. 

Maria was 25 years old when she first married. That seemed a little old to me until I learned about the Western European marriage pattern and the Hajnal line. Men and women began marrying later in Western Europe than in Eastern Europe beginning in the 1600s. So Maria was typical in that way. She married František Nováček, of Sokolí, a village about ten miles east of her home.

How might they have met? Kněžice was the larger community, so business might have brought František Nováček that direction. Maria’s father, Josef Obrdlík, was a butcher, and his work would have kept him close to home. But people married later in Western Europe because they first established themselves as servants or apprentices. Primogeniture meant that the eldest son inherited everything, so younger sons had to start over. And women never inherited their father’s wealth, even though they contributed to it. So it is more likely that Maria went to work like the young women that Willa Cather describes in O Pioneers! and My Ántonia, who hired themselves out to wealthier households and found husbands that way. 

Maria Obrdlíková never immigrated, but I imagine that if she went into service as a young woman, she would have done so to help her family, not merely to catch the eye of a potential husband. In My Ántonia, Cather describes how this ethic helped Bohemian and Scandinavian families prosper more rapidly in Nebraska than the English farmers (from Pennsylvania or Virginia) who refused to send their daughters to work:

There was a curious social situation in Black Hawk. All the young men felt the attraction of the fine, well-set-up country girls who had come to town to earn a living, and, in nearly every case, to help the father struggle out of debt, or to make it possible for the younger children of the family to go to school. 

However they met, František Nováček brought Maria back to Sokolí in 1847, and they had four children. Johann was the oldest, though he died at age two. Anna came next, then František, Jr. And Mary was pregnant with the fourth when her husband died in 1856. She gave birth to Josef Nováček just one month later. 

I wonder how it felt to be newly widowed while holding a newborn, whether the baby helped ease Maria’s grief or whether she suffered from postpartum blues that intensified her mourning. Her oldest son, František, was just two years old then, and her daughter Anna was scarcely four. Maria might have had help from her in-laws, but I imagine that she felt very much alone with two toddlers and a newborn. 

By the following spring, when Josef was seven months old, Maria remarried. If she had not, I would never have been born, because she married her husband’s cousin, František Doležal. So many Františeks! (Franz in German. Frank in English.) 

Their first child was Karel Doležal, my great great grandfather, who went on to father seven children of his own in Nebraska. (Karl in German. Charles in English.)

I’ll get to Karel another time, but I want to think a little more about Maria, the fortitude it must have taken for her to start over with a new man (though did she really have any other option?). Did she try to help her children, who would always be Nováčeks, fit into the new household with their Cousin František, who was now their stepfather? Did Anna and František, Jr. and Josef feel resentful of Baby Karel, or were they happy together? 

I would like to imagine Maria as a good mother, jolly and warm. But what do I know? Maybe she was grumpy and yelled a lot. Maybe she was no saint. Maybe she was scared and just trying to survive. Whatever she was, she was resilient. 

Maria had two more children with František Doležal. Their first daughter, another Maria, was born in 1861. And their youngest, Francisca, in 1863. 

In 1867, at the age of 44, Maria Obrdlíková Nováčková Doležalová died. She would have been two years younger than I am now. 

I don’t want to romanticize Maria’s life. She never went to college, but neither of her husbands and none of her children did, either. I am tempted to remember her simply as Maria Obrdlík, in solidarity with Czech women who have recently petitioned to have the patriarchal “ová” (added to either their father’s or their husband’s surname) removed from their legal names. But that would be rewriting her life in ways that she would have thought strange, if not outright false.

We are prone to myth-making about mothers. Willa Cather turned her childhood friend, Anna Sadilek Pavelka, into Ántonia, a kind of Earth Mother. Cather’s narrator, Jim Burden, describes Ántonia as “a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.” I have no doubt that my Maria was remarkable to her family in all of the ways that my mother is to me. But in many ways she was typical for her time. Maria does not need to become iconic to bring meaning to my family story.

What I see in her biography is how many major life changes can happen even if you die just ten miles from your birthplace. She was, in a way, an expert at transitions. When I imagine the challenges she faced, my own struggles feel diminished. Maria also reminds me how fortunate any of us is to be alive. She was one of many dominoes that had to fall the right way for me to have this chance. Remembering Maria sparks the burning question that Mary Oliver asks in her poem “The Summer Day.”

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?