Looking for Grandma Tolman

Mrs. B’s maternal grandparents were, by family lore, “Bohemian.” A few years ago visiting the Czech Republic, we ventured out to find the footprint of her grandfather, Tomas Jicinsky. With the gracious assistance of a great tour guide, we found the house where Tomas was born (in a village in Bohemia about 40 miles east of Prague, now a trendy weekend cottage community)—along with family records going back to the 18^th Century.

Last week, in Vienna, we set out on the same search for her grandmother, Anna Tolman, later Anna Tolman Jicinsky. We found he, too, though perhaps not quite as comprehensively. We did visit the village where Anna was born--Gainfarn, near Baden, south of Vienna (map--and that's Gainfarn in the picture). It’s another attractive place, again perhaps a bit gentrified, but we couldn’t get a grip on anything specific. We had somewhat better luck at Kottingbrunn a few miles away, where Tomas and Anna were married in 1889 (map). Kottingbrunn retains a bit more of its old flavor—there’s a moated grange, which actually counts as a kind of tourist destination.

But every frontier is a horizon, and all this leaves new questions. How, exactly, did these two get together? How did Tomas get to Gainfarn? Family lore has it that he was some sort of metal-basher (in America, specifically in Wisconsin, he was a farmer). In Vienna, that might have made some sense, but what kind of metal was there to bash in Gainfarn? More to the point, what were the Tolmans doing there? It's pretty clearly a Czech name. We asked if there is a Czech community around Gainfarn now? No—and there is no evidence there ever was one. Gainfarn did become a spa in the late years of the Hapsburgs, which may have been sufficient to provide employment for the young Anna, who may have been some sort of domestic. But it doesn’t seem sufficient to explain why her family was there in the first place. Questions like this will, I suspect, remain unanswered: as is so often the case with this sort of thing, virtually all the people who could have offered any kind of testimony died long before we ever began to get curious.