Thomas Kral
Thomas Kral was born in Bohemia in 1884 and came to America in 1907, at twenty-two. He was a carpenter. He married Rosie Penc in Cook County in the spring of 1925, settled at Brookfield, a village west of Chicago on the Burlington line, and raised seven children in one house there. He died at Brookfield on 19 September 1954, five days after his seventieth birthday, and was buried at Forest Park.
He spent eighteen years in America before he married, which is long for a man who arrived at twenty-two, and no known record says where he spent them. The first record that fixes him anywhere is the marriage licence of 11 April 1925, taken out in Cook County, where he gives his age as forty. His eldest son Frank had been born in Chicago ten months earlier, on 9 June 1924.
By 1930 the household was at Brookfield and it never moved again. The 1940 census asked every person where they had lived five years before and the whole family answered the same house, which is the plainest thing the record says about them: they stayed. Seven children were born between 1924 and 1938: Frank, Rose, Elizabeth, Sylvia, Emily, Daniel and Lydia.
In 1942 he registered at Brookfield for what the country called the old man's draft, the fourth registration, which took men between forty-five and sixty-four. He was fifty-seven. Nobody of that age was going to be called; the point of the registration was to inventory the skills the war might need, and he was a carpenter.
His death certificate names his own father as Thomas Kral and his mother as Mary, and that is the whole of what is known of the generation above him.
Sources
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Cite: Heirology, "Thomas Kral (1884-1954)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/thomas-kral-1884-1954-1288b6.