My Family History Story

“LOST MUSKET DIARY” Tuesday October 21, 2014

Sunny 77F/25C/ in Rancho Santa Margarita, CA      

Buongiorno,

              This week, I found another treasure among the family photos and papers that make up my family archives. It was a yellowed, eight page essay written by my father for his sociology class at the University of Pittsburgh, probably around 1929 or ‘30. This typewritten document opened a window on his world for me. Now, as I read this story, I realized that it was familiar to me. He had talked about his family in the “Olden Days,” in family conversations over Sunday dinners after church at our house. But, with his hand typed memoir in my possession, I can share my dad’s first-hand account as Charles Botula told it him self so long ago.

My grandparents had come to the United States in 1903 from what is now the Czech Republic. Back then, it was part of the Austrian Empire, and they were part of a massive migration from Eastern Europe. People fleeing poverty, persecution and war who were looking for a better life in America. The family started its upward climb  to the middle class from the very lowest rung on the ladder. Actually, it wasn’t even the ground floor. It was more like subterranean. My grandfather Botula started his new life in America as a coal miner.

Karel Botula “got off the boat” in Philadelphia in 1903  and started work in Cokeburg, Pennsylvania,  a small coal mining town near Pittsburgh. My grandmother, Johana, arrived with her three children, Karola, Maximilian, and Frantiska at Ellis Island a short time later and joined him in Cokeburg.

My grandfather Botula worked for the James W. Ellsworth Coal Company.    Karel Botula was one of the thousands who answered the call. He was a young man, married with three young children. In the Europe of that era, his family faced a bleak future. America, in his mind, offered the future he wanted for his family. So, in 1903 he booked passage to the United States, arriving in Philadelphia and traveling on to a small mining town in western Pennsylvania. His wife, Johana and the couple’s three children followed him a few months later, arriving at Ellis Island in New York harbor.

Dad picks up the story from there. “It took a lot of researching on my part to get a complete picture of the turn of the century migration that brought my family to America in the first place and I still have a lot to learn about my family’s early life in Europe, but this much I have learned.”

Cokeburg, Pennsylvania was a “company town,” built and maintained by the Ellsworth Coal Mining

Company. The company owned the land and built the homes the miners and their families lived in; operated the company store where they bought their groceries and other necessities; built the church where they worshipped; built the school and hired its teachers, and it provided medical care to the miners and their families. The town’s entire purpose was to mine the bituminous coal deep underground and from this raw material bake it in massive ovens to turn it into coke, a hot burning, gray, ash-like product used in the manufacture of steel. The coke ovens dotted the countryside around the mineshafts, and, as the coal was distilled into coke, the ovens gave off thick clouds of black sulfurous smoke. Karel Botula’s job was not only dangerous from the necessity of digging for the coal deep underground, but the work was carried out in environmentally dangerous conditions. I can remember as a small boy seeing the smoke from the ovens and the downwind hillsides near them that were devoid of all living trees and brush. In the center of the village was a huge slag heap, where the mine tailings, and waste from the coke ovens were piled high. Today, the slag heap has been reclaimed as a park, but then it was a raw wasteland where the immigrant children would play.