I almost didn't get here. It took me three tries. In 1983 I came to what was then Czechoslovakia, but only saw Prague. I had no idea where my ancestral home town was at that time. In 2017 I had planned to visit Tura Luka as part of a five city tour of Central Europe. But in Vienna, a bicyclist ran down Michael and gave him a compound fracture of the arm. We spent a week in hospital during which time, and this is no joke, my father died. So we returned to America on the next flight.
This time, 2019, was the charm. We completed that ill-fated trip by finishing with the three cities that remained, Prague, Bratislava, and Krakow. In Bratislava we rented a car and drove 1 1/2 hours to the countryside to see the four villages my paternal great-grandparents came from: Tura Luka (Holic), Myjava (Michaelez), Sobotiste (Kristofik), and Vrbovce (Chodur Dolinsky). Now I knew three of the four villages from my grandmother, but not Tura Luka. Today if I were researching it would take me a hour or less to discover the place. It took several years before the advent of computers. I remember having to wait for the 1920 census to be released to find my grandfather on it. With the name of the town, I searched the unindexed 1910 U.S. Census for the Hollicks. I found them spelled Hollitsch and my great-grandfather saying he had been in the country for ten years. I then searched the shipping records for Ellis Island for all of 1900. I started in January and almost gave up before finding the ship on 22 December 1900. That record had the place of origin as Tura Luka. Luckily my great-grandparents married in Slovakia, so it was easy to find that marriage record in Tura Luka and confirm that these were indeed my people. But it was a lot of searching through microfilm at that time.
Tura Luka is now a suburb of larger Myjava. We found the old Catholic church but not the Lutheran church. It didn't seem poor but solidly middle class. All the homes were modern and none looked to be over 100 years old, so certainly none that my great-grandfather lived in. It was odd to think that if my great-grandfather didn't make the decision to come over, I might have been born there. And for me into a communist system.
The rolling hills of Slovakia are beautiful. This is an area, very close to to the border of Czechia. It was very green and full of farms. I'm glad I went.
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