Finding my Roots: A Journey to the Home Country

This class will retrace the journey of the instructor’s grandfather, Josef Holkup, from the Czech Republic to North Dakota, a journey like the one many of your ancestors made. We will show pictures that will help explain who they were and where they came and the lure of owning land. We will touch on the harsh realities of homesteading in North Dakota. In 2011, the instructor visited the Czech Republic meeting many relatives, traveling as “a local rather than as a tourist”. He saw the farmstead where his grandfather was born and a church nearly 1,000 years old that the family attended for hundreds of years. This presentation will use lecture, pictures and group discussion to help tell the story of our immigrant ancestors.