John Andrew Kovach Sr.
John Kovacs was born in Slovakia, then the northern part of the Kingdom of Hungary. His gravestone gives the year as 1883, and a memorial for him gives 1888. The Ohio death index gives his age at death as seventy-five, which puts his birth in 1887 or 1888 and agrees with the memorial. The same memorials name his parents as Andrew Kovacs and Mary, with no source given. The family wrote the name Kovach. The American records write Kovacs.
A memorial for his wife gives their marriage as 17 October 1906 in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, probably at Jerome. Her own passenger list of 1910 puts that in doubt, because she told the inspector she had never been in the United States. Their first son, John Jr., was born in Slovakia on 17 September 1908. By February 1910 John was in Pennsylvania, at Jerome in Somerset County, with his post-office box at number 24. That month Mary crossed on the Caronia with the baby and joined him there. The family remembered a voyage "with the baby", and it was hers. John had gone ahead alone.
Back in Pennsylvania the children kept coming. Michael was born in February 1911 and Anna in January 1913. The family then moved to Aliquippa in Beaver County, the steel town on the Ohio River below Pittsburgh. Malveene was born there in April 1915 and Elizabeth in November 1919, with Andrew between them. By 1923 they were in Cleveland, and John was naturalized there on 6 September 1923. Margaret, the youngest, was born about 1927 or 1928.
In April 1940 the family lived at 19416 Kinsman Road. Mary died there suddenly on the twelfth, aged fifty-two. John gave the clerk the details for her certificate. He knew her father's name, Mike Henczovsky, and he did not know her mother's maiden name. Margaret was twelve, and the older children were married or nearly so. She later remembered the years that followed, alone in the house with her father, as an unhappy stretch.
He lived twenty-three years more. His obituary gives his address as 23701 Miles Avenue and calls him the beloved husband of Mary, nee Hencovsky. He died on 16 July 1963 in Holmes County, Ohio, a widower of seventy-five. The state death index gives his home as Warrensville Heights, in Cuyahoga County, and notes that an autopsy was performed. He lay at the Rusynyk-Yurch funeral home on Union Avenue, the same firm that had buried Mary, and the service was held there and at Saint Michael Russian Orthodox Church on Saturday 20 July. He was buried beside her at Saint Theodosius Orthodox Cemetery in Brooklyn, Ohio, under the stone that carries her photograph.
Kovacs means smith and is one of the commonest names in central Europe, and no passenger list has been tied to him. His home village is not known. His wife was born at Rákócz, now Rakovec nad Ondavou, in the old Zemplén county, and baptised there in the Greek Catholic church. Her 1910 passenger list gives Petrocz as her home, and it was most likely his village, but nothing places John there.
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Cite: Heirology, "John Andrew Kovach Sr. (1888-1963)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/john-andrew-kovach-sr-1888-1963-174bff.