Turns out that maybe my great grandfather wasn’t an illegal alien. My mother says that a cousin found that he entered through Texas. She wonders if he worked his way over on a cargo ship since he had no family to help him pay for the passage. I guess he thought coming to America would be better than staying in Slovenia which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and run the risk of being conscripted into their army.
Illegal alien?
Published inGeneral
Lisa, Grandma Begus would sometimes talk about Franz Josef, the last great Hapsburg emperor. I remember how she would get a far-away look in her eyes especially when mentioning “Rudy,” meaning the monarch’s ill-fated son and crown prince Rudolf, who made a suicide pact with his lover and executed it when his father tried to force him to stop seeing her. Rudolf’s brother Maximillian, who was executed by a firing squad in Mexico, may have been the son of Napoleon II (Bonaparte’s son), Sophie, his mother, was rumored to have had an affair with Napoleon II while the latter was in Vienna; his mother was Austrian (another Marie! Marie Louise; that name must have been really popular around that time). She was a very strong and smart woman who more or less ruled for Franz Josef during his early years on the throne.
There are tons of interesting stories about the Hapsburgs. I’m sure Gram absorbed all of them and brought them to America in her heart.