Summary
The oldest relative we have positively identified is Franz Joseph Chadima (1825-1911) who emigrated to North America from Bohemia (now the Czech Republic) after his father received permission in 1856 to exempt him from the tax roles. On Aug 10, 1857 Franz, a professional musician, married Marie Theresa (1829-1919) at Old St. Mary´s catholic church at Chicago, Illinois, Those records burned in the 1871 Chicago fire .
Franz served in the Union Army as a drummer during the U.S. Civil War. After the war, the couple moved to the Pacific Northwest and homesteaded near Kalama, Washington State.
Their only male son, Frank Chadima had no descendants. Daughter Isabelle had one girl. Their second daughter, Blanche Rose Chadima (1877-1964), married three times. Her first marriage, with Joseph Archer Nesbit (1855-1945), gave two sons with male descendants: the Nesbit-Heuchart, Nesbit-XMary branches, and three daughters producing the Hamm-Nesbit and the Segar-Nesbit branches. Blanche Rose’s last two marriages raise only daughters that originate the branches Harris-Harmon, Wray Harmon and Pitt-Mc Gowan.
Recognition and Sources
In 2007 Franz´s great granddaughter Kathy travelled to Czech Republic. She did research at the Prague archives with the assistance of a local expert and met M. Chadima, a serious genealogist who over decades had built a Chadima family tree going back to the 1600´s. That Chadima family originated from Siroky Dul, a rural sparsely populated area of the Pardubice Region. To 2022 we have not been able to confirm or deny a linkage between our Franz and the ancestors in that family tree.
Research Priorities
- We would like to collaborate with known and new Chadima family researchers in the Czech Republic, North America or elsewhere. We plan to enable Czech and German language translations.
- We are actively looking for Marie Theresa’s maternal family name and her adoptive last name, if any, since she always used her married name.