Family

It is great to be home. As I write this, I am sitting on the deck in back of the house. The sun has just fallen and the stars are peaking out of the deepening blue that outlines the dark treetops. The whisper of the leaves as they dance with the wind make a wonderful melody as they blend in with the chorus of tree frogs and the occasional songbird trying to find its way home. I love being home. I always thought it was because I missed this, sitting on the deck, being outside with the wind and the trees. But it was more than this I missed, it was this feeling combined with the knowledge that my family was sitting right inside watching TV. That my mom might come out soon to join me and talk about our day. That I had just had dinner with my grandma and my cousins and I would be able to do it again tomorrow night if I wanted. It was the feeling of safety, of being content, of belonging that I had been missing all these years. Knowing that my family is close lets me finally relax. It is almost like returning to childhood, returning to a place of simple peace and confidence that everything will always work out. There is more to my life now than the problems I dealt with when I was a child, but the feeling is still the same. 

I know not all families are like mine. I know that I am quadruple lucky too because I have four families that all support each other through thick and thin. Between large, raucous family gatherings with my dad and stepmoms family (a bunch of Italians and a bunch of Australians) and my mom’s side of the family meeting every Sunday at my grandma’s, I am never short on family support. My stepdad’s family lives mostly out in Tennessee and I don’t see them as much, but I still remember their family reunion and how much fun I had. And now, I also have Michael’s family – and couldn’t ask for a better fit. Michael and I are so excited for the wedding; it will be so fun to get all of our families together. Family has always been important to me, I think because that has how it has always been throughout generations.

Me pointing to my great grandpa's name on the wall on a very chilly day at Ellis Island

From my dad’s side, I have traced our family history back to Italy and what was then Czechoslovakia. The Verre family was from Rende, Italy, Calabria. My grandma kept meticulous notes – her parents Carl and Mary immigrated to America in 1909. Even though his dad remained in Italy, Carl and his brothers saved up enough money to buy him a suit and sent it to Italy. When I was little, I remember attending my great grandma Verre’s 100^th birthday party. I have never met so much family in my life. Grandma great was mildly interested in meeting some of her great grandkids, but she showed true excitement when they announced it was time for dinner. A true Italian.

Gaspero had a picture taken of him wearing the suit his sons bought him and sent it in a letter to America

The other half, the Letzter side, first came to America via Josef Letzter on a cattle boat departed from London under the fake name of Smith to escape the German draft. He and his wife (who immigrated with him from the current day Horsovsky Tyn, Pilzen district of the Czech Republic) soon were running a profitable saloon and grocery store. While he sold and bartended, his wife made free lunches for the customers. When Josef’s parents immigrated years later, they all lived together in a house in Chicago that still stands today. Josef never got to meet his grandparents, but what he may have not known about his family name was that it used to be Posledni. His grandfather, Valentin, was a village herd and day laborer. Posledni in Czech means “the last.” When he married a German woman, it was changed to Letzter, which means “the last” in German.

 Another interesting tidbit of family history, Josef’s son, Josef Jr. was the treasurer for Monarch Brewery in Chicago and was known to carry $100 in his pocket “just in case.” He died in 1934 after being beaten by a police officer. His house was sold to the famous Chicago mobster Sam Giancana – 1147 South Wenonah Ave, Oak Park IL. I am sure there is more to that story, but that is what we know. Chicago had to be an exciting time in the 1920’s, it makes me love the city even more knowing that my family has been in this great city for generations and seen it all.

The house of Josef Jr. today

It took a lot of hard work to discover all of this. Most of it I found in my grandmothers meticulous notes, others from what my dad has tracked down. Just recently, we met a fellow Letzter only living 3 hours away that was a distant cousin. Family history was her hobby and she had tracked down information on ancestors all the way back to the 1700’s. Of course she would share what she had found with us, we were family after all. Something about knowing your family’s history makes you feel that more connected, that much more a part of this world.

The old Monarch Brewery in Chicago

When I think of my mom’s side of the family, I think of my grandma. My grandma was one of 11 children. Her father was working in the coal mines in Michigan when he met her mother. After a brief stint in Ohio, they moved to Chicago to raise a family. Her mother was from what was then Yugoslavia and her father immigrated in 1903 from what is now Smarata, Slovenia. (His last name was Bavec, but when he immigrated it turned into the American translation of Bavetz). During the Great Depression, her father Andreas housed and fed the entire family on $13/week. The children slept four to a bed and their soup for dinner would only have one small piece of meat in it, which her father got to eat since he had to work. Through all of this, my grandma tells me, they not once ever had a fight. It was not the Bavetz way, she would tell me. This mentality of family first and family together has carried down through the generations. It is certainly something that I want to uphold.

Her father did not speak English well and just recently she gifted me his Slovene to English textbook he had bought to learn. In it are all of his notes and scribbles from a time long past. He worked hard and eventually was able to move out into the country where the family would work outside in the woods and in the gardens and gather for family picnics underneath the hickory tree on the hill. When I was little, we would still have those family picnics. And even today, although we usually gather in my grandma’s living room or on the deck, that hickory tree is still standing right outside.

I am sad I did not get to meet my great grandfather Andreas in person. My mom recalls his love for Twinkies and how he would eat raw eggs and put the empty shells back in the carton to mess with his wife. He was early to bed and early to rise. When company was over and was staying too late, he would never tell them to leave, but would do everything to hint at it. If someone got up from a chair, he would walk past, fold up the chair, and put it away. Once he just walked over, starting cleaning things up, and then turned off the lights. 

 What my grandma didn’t know until he died, was that he still kept in touch with his sister and nephew in Slovenia throughout all of his years in America – writing notes in Slovene and sending cash when he could. It was many years later when my grandma received a letter from her father’s brother Vinco that we started to discover more family we had around the world. You see, Vinco had moved to Argentina and married, but he still kept in touch with the rest of the family in Slovenia. In just the past 2 or 3 years, we have met our family in Argentina and are planning a reunion in Slovenia. The family resemblance with these newfound relatives in most amazing. Knowing some Spanish from my time spent down in Chile on a school trip (I kicking myself for not knowing about my newfound family during my trip) I am working on learning Slovenian so I can learn as much as I can when we meet in a few years time. What amazes me is that our family in Argentina regularly visits and is very close with our family in Slovenia, we Americans were the missing section of the family, and now we will all be together again soon. The world is a very large, very small place.

The family house in Slovenia that generations of the Bavetz family has lived in and still live in to this day

Of my grandfather’s side of my mom’s family, we do not know much. When my grandpa first saw my grandma, it was love at first site. Unfortunately for him, she wanted nothing to do with him. Luckily, he pestered her enough that she finally agreed to go on just one date with him, and the rest is history. My grandfather’s parents both immigrated from somewhere in the Germany/Czechoslovakia area, but not much more in known about their history. My mom clearly recalls her grandparents well and has fond memories of them, but they were not as tightly knit as a family as the Bavetz’s are. Try as I might, my research has shed little light on the history of the Koffend side of the family. The loss of family stories and history is a shame, but I know the legacy of all of my families still lives on.

My grandpa Koffend loved the outdoors. Even well into his seventies, he would go on week long backpacking snowmobile trips and would fish almost every day. My grandparents had a lot of property and I remember when I was really little, he would round up all my cousins and me and get us really excited to go on a wagon ride. He would hitch up the tractor and take us all out into the middle of the woods and ask us who was able to pick up the most sticks. That is some clever child labor if I have ever heard of it. At dinnertimes, he used to scare me because if you did not eat all of the meat off your bones he would growl at you and reach over to clean the meat off himself. It scared me then, but I catch myself doing the same to my fiancé now  - who would have thought it?

With all of the changes to the area that my family originated from it is hard to directly define my heritage. With some birth records saying Yugoslavia, while others list Austria. Some list Czechoslovakia while some simply list bohemia. What I can gather for modern day, I am ¼ Italian, ¼ Slovenian, and ½ Czech. Better yet, I can mostly describe my family heritage as bohemian. If you haven’t looked into your family history yet, I highly recommend it. Just hearing the stories and learning some history about your heritage is humbling and exciting. I feel connected with family members that have passed away generations ago. I am sure Valentin and I would have great conversations about horses and Luca Bavec and I would love to sightsee around Libuijana and compare it to how it was in 1692. I feel that my family can remain close today because we appreciate our past and find it important to maintain close ties with each other. I am sure by now, if I was to try to track down every single distant cousin and aunt my family would span across the globe. We are all family in some way, maybe through marriage or friendships or distant bloodlines. We should treat each other as such.