Franziska (Augustin) Flachs (1852 - 1918)

Born 8 Oct 1852 in Fürstenthal, Radautz, Bukowina, Austria

Ancestors

Descendants

Died 26 Oct 1918 at age 66 in Ellis, Ellis County, Kansas, USA

Problems/Questions Profile managers: Daniel 林丹尼 Lindbergh Lang [send private message] and Becky 林贝卡 Lang [send private message]

Biography

Franziska (Augustin) Flachs has Austrian Roots.

Franziska was a Roman Catholic.

"The first Bukovina emigrants in Ellis Township, a subdivision of Ellis County, were Lutherans who settled there in 1886. [...] In the same year, 1886, the Catholic Franz Erbert from Buchenhain (Poiana-Mikuli) scouted the prospects in Ellis County. He returned in 1887 with his wife Rosalia Reitmeyer and their children. Accompanying them were Franz Flachs and his wife Franziska Augustin, Joseph Tauscher and his wife Theresa Bena, and their children.

"Eileen Langley has noted [...] that 36 families who came from Fürstenthal and Poiana-Mikuli were Catholic (see her page iii).6 This has been assessed by the naturalization record and census research of Drs. Forsythe and Schneller, who documented 30 Bukovina German families in Ellis county in 1895, 81 in 1905, 110 in 1915 and 140 in 1920. There were also 18 Bukovina German families in Trego County and three in Rooks County.7"

"I. Introduction

Bukovina was the easternmost crown colony in the Austrian empire following its annexation in 1775. This rural area of 10,422 square kilometers on the outer eastern curve of the Carpathian mountains was sparsely populated by about sixty thousand poor peasants and shepherds. Soon it became multinational as Poles, Ukrainians, Romanians, Jews, Germans, Serbs, Croatians, Slovaks, Hungarians, Armenians and others came there in response to the Hapsburg policy of religious toleration and the colonization programs of Maria Theresa and her son Joseph II. Within about ten years, the region’s population had more than doubled. By 1880, or within a century, it had multiplied tenfold. The region’s 1880 census data reported that twelve percent of the total population was Jewish with the remainder being Ukrainian (42%), Romanian (33%), German (19%), and Polish (3%), with smaller numbers of Hungarians, Slovaks, and others. These percentages remained fairly consistent through 1910.2

Bukovina’s economy remained agricultural with much of the land owned and administered by the state’s Religion Fund. Lands were divided and re-divided between heirs so that it became impossible to support a family upon a farm even with the supplemental income gained through a trade such as shoemaking, barrel-making, or blacksmithing. This fact, and the related rapid growth in population, contributed to the emigration from Bukovina beginning in the 1880s.

At that time, travel agents recruited German immigrants to the Americas by publishing ads in Bukovina newspapers and distributing flyers in the cities and villages. A 1913 survey found in the Czernowitz archives reported that 33,369 citizens had legally left the country between about 1880 and 1913. Almost 90% cited North America as their destination. Dr. Kurt Rein has estimated that another 10,000-12,000 might have emigrated illegally to avoid military service. Therefore the total number of Bukovina emigrants may have been about 40,000, or approximately 4-5% of the population. Many of these were Jews and Germans and comparatively few were Romanian and Hungarian according to Dr. Rein, who further notes that 40% of the German emigrants were Bohemian, 25% “ Swabian,” 10% Zipser, and 25% from various other backgrounds.3

Emigrants traveled first by rail for several days to Bremen, Hamburg, or other European ports, then by ship for about two weeks to U.S. ports of entry such as New York City, Baltimore, Galveston, and New Orleans, or the Canadian city of Quebec. From these ports, they journeyed again by train for several days to reach a center of Bukovina immigration. These included Ellis County in the State of Kansas, the Edenwold area in the Assiniboia district near Regina (now the Province of Saskatchewan, Canada), Yuma in the State of Colorado, Lewis County in the State of Washington, as well as Chicago and New York City. Smaller groups connected by their Baptist faith settled near Pocatello in the States of Idaho and west of Waco in the State of Texas.

II. Ellis County, Kansas/USA

What comes into your mind when you hear the word “Kansas”? Some of you may picture endless wheat fields and others might visualize steppe-like grasslands. The Bukovina Germans settled in northwestern Ellis County which does not fit these stereotypes. North of the city of Ellis, the prairie leads to the Arien Hills, as unspoiled and natural as when William G. Cutler described them in his 1883 History of the State of Kansas. Further north near the Rooks County line, high bluffs overlook the Saline River. These are two regions in which the Bukovina immigrants settled beginning in the summer of 1886. They had probably not heard that Cutler had written, “… [Ellis] is surrounded by a rough, broken country, altogether unsuited for agricultural pursuits, so that its country trade is very limited.”4

Why Ellis? Cutler wrote that it was the end of the third division of the Kansas Pacific Railway, whose roundhouse and machine shops employed many men. It merged with the Union Pacific, which continued to advertise and sell its land to Bukovina emigrants at the turn of the century. Although several families arrived when government land for homesteading was still available, many purchased adjacent lands at low cost from the railroad and thereby established a rural community extending west into Trego County and north into Rooks County.5

The first Bukovina emigrants in Ellis Township, a subdivision of Ellis County, were Lutherans who settled there in 1886. [...] In the same year, 1886, the Catholic Franz Erbert from Buchenhain (Poiana-Mikuli) scouted the prospects in Ellis County. He returned in 1887 with his wife Rosalia Reitmeyer and their children. Accompanying them were Franz Flachs and his wife Franziska Augustin, Joseph Tauscher and his wife Theresa Bena, and their children.

Eileen Langley has noted that almost all of the 50 families who came from Illischestie, Fratautz, and Tereblestie to Ellis were Lutherans, and that 36 families who came from Fürstenthal and Poiana-Mikuli were Catholic (see her page iii).6 This has been assessed by the naturalization record and census research of Drs. Forsythe and Schneller, who documented 30 Bukovina German families in Ellis county in 1895, 81 in 1905, 110 in 1915 and 140 in 1920. There were also 18 Bukovina German families in Trego County and three in Rooks County.7

[...] On page 49 of his book Bohemian Germans in Kansas, Oren Windholz lists these Bukovina Catholic family names: Aschenbrenner, Augustine, Baumgardtner, Beer, Erbert, Flax, Fuerch, Gaschler, Geschwentner, Gnad, Hoedel, Honas, Kisslinger, Kappel, Kohlrus, Koslowski, Kubbitz (Kuppetz?), Kucharek, Laundauer, Lang, Nemeczek, Neuberger, Rach, Rankel, Reitmayer, Schneller, Schuster, Seibel, Seidel, Tauscher, and Weber. Additional family names of immigrant wives were Fuchs, Muehlbauer, Haas, Stadler, Bena, Schindelar, Hackl, Eigner, Straub, Adelsberger, and Beuer.

These Bohemian Catholics acquired farm land closer to town than did the Lutherans so within a few years of immigration, they were working at trades or operating businesses in Ellis and were also participating in local politics. Their earliest arrivals coincided with the construction of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Ellis which began in 1888. From the start, therefore, they worshiped with other Catholics, including Irish and Czech immigrants and Germans from the Volga River district of Russia. The first church was replaced about twenty years later with a beautiful, magnificent structure of Fort Hays chalk, or limestone, found in this part of the county. To obtain the stone for construction, top soil was removed from thick layers of rock which was then perforated by hand augers. Wedges were inserted into the holes and then tapped with a hammer until the rock sprang apart. This stone was then taken to the building site. This was a great effort without modern hoists or power tools since each stone weighed between 50 and 100 pounds.8

Although both groups spoke the same language and shared a place of origin, their interaction in Kansas was limited. Oren Windholz notes that both Catholics and Lutherans discouraged socializing and intermarriages, but that it did occur just as it had in Bukovina.9 The immigrant Richard Hoffman, born in Illischestie in 1901, told Oren that his mother, Luise Zehaczek Hoffmann, was the daughter of the Catholic Wenzel Zehaczek and his Lutheran wife Katharina Zachmann, who raised their sons as Catholics and their daughters as Lutherans.10

Because of the declining agricultural economy, an unstable oil industry, and increasingly low water levels, the population of Ellis County has been falling in recent years. The people have been, and are continuing, to move to Wichita and Kansas City, to Denver and Colorado Springs, as well as to Phoenix and Los Angeles. But you can wander along the country roads north of Ellis and still see the crumbling stone houses and farm buildings abandoned by the Bukovina pioneers, and you can still see their descendants farming the land and working in their community.

You may learn more about the Bukovina settlements in Kansas by reading my book The Illischestie Germans in Kansas: A 200-Year History of the Lutheran Swabians and Oren Windholz’s book Bohemian Germans in Kansas: A Catholic Community from Bukovina."

Buried Ellis, Ellis County, Kansas, USA. File File: Media Format: jpg. Franczeska

Sources

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/20484151/franziska-flachs

• Lang family records with Uncle Al