Jan Sekavec
Jan Sekavec, John in the American records, was born in house number 29 at Chocenice, a village west of Kolín in Central Bohemia, in the first days of January 1813. He was the first child baptized in the parish of Křečhoř that year. His father, Matěj Sekavec, was a familiant. A familiant, in the Bohemian villages of that time, was a small holder settled on a plot carved out of the lord's own farmland when the estates were parcelled out in the late 1700s. He held a cottage and a few fields of his own and paid rent for them, a step below the sedlák, the full peasant farmer with a farm and a team. His mother, Anna Nouzák, was the daughter of Josef Nouzák, a familiant of Zlaté Slunce, a hamlet of the same parish.
On 30 June 1841, at 28, Jan married Anna Vosecký, 23, at Svojšice. She was the daughter of the late Jan Vosecký, a farmer of Bošice, and of Anna Buřič of Pečky. The banns were read on three Sundays in June, a marriage permit had been issued on the 16th, and one of the witnesses was a familiant from Chocenice. Their son Frank, Frantisek, was born the next year by the reckoning of his gravestone.
By the 1850s Jan had risen above his father's station. At the baptisms of his children at Krychnov, house number 21, the priest called him a sedlák, a full peasant farmer. Václav, later Winslow, was born there on 2 June 1853, and Johanna Anna on 27 August 1857. People from Chocenice still stood godparents: František Mokrý, a farmer of Chocenice, for Václav, and his wife Marie for Johanna. The family was still at Krychnov in 1857.
In 1866 the family emigrated and went, so far as the records show, straight to Blue Earth County in southern Minnesota. The 1870 census found Jan farming there with Anna, a son recorded as Wemer, which is Winslow, the Václav of the family, and his daughter Johanna. His sons Frank and Joseph had farms of their own nearby, and Joseph's two eldest daughters died of scarlet fever at Jamestown Township in November 1873.
Before 1880 the whole family moved to Kansas, to the new Bohemian colony at Holyrood in Ellsworth County, whose cemetery was named for the Czech historian Palacky. In the 1880 census Jan and Anna were living almost next door to their daughter Johanna, now the wife of Joseph Zajic, a family that had travelled with them from Bohemia to Minnesota to Kansas. Jan died at Ellsworth on 24 March 1881, aged 68, and Anna followed him in November. Both lie in Palacky Cemetery at Holyrood.
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Cite: Heirology, "Jan Sekavec (1813-1881)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/jan-sekavec-1812-1881-ac07a0.