By MICHAEL F. DWYER
The nucleus of this story started in my classroom at Otter Valley sixteen years ago. Steven Kallen was looking at a calendar near my desk that featured a photo of Proctor’s marble bridge. He said, “My great-grandfather worked on that bridge shortly after arriving here from Hungary. He worked for the Vermont Marble Company.” In the intervening years, I have learned a great deal more about Steven’s extended family through their association with the Pittsford Congregational Church.
Steven’s great-grandparents John Kallen (1890–1970) and Theresa [Teréz, in Hungarian] Vadja (1895–1979), living among three hundred Magyar-speaking Hungarians in Proctor, married at the Union Church in on February 17, 1923. Theresa, age 27, arrived the year before aboard the ship Laconia, which sailed from Liverpool to New York. Her sponsor, brother Imri [anglicized to Emery] Vajda, immigrated to the U.S. in 1906, first living in Pennsylvania, before settling in Proctor. After World War I, immigration laws became stricter. In a court deposition, preserved by the family, Emery petitioned “that he is anxious to have his sister Teréz Vojda…unmarried, immigrate to the United States, destination Proctor, Vermont, at the earliest time convenient.” He stated that he had the means to support her and provide a home so that she would never become a public charge. Teréz’s photo accompanied the deposition.
Throughout her long life, Theresa wrote letters home to her family in Hungary. Hearing news of her death, her family tolled the bell in her native church in Takácsi, Hungary. As you will read below, in 1997 Theresa’s nephew, Sándor Vajda, and his son György visited their Kallen/Vajda relatives in Vermont. Steven Kallen maintains correspondence with his cousin György Vadja, a retired sports writer from Budapest, who also serves as Mayor of Takásci. He put me in touch with György, my first Facebook friend in Hungary, who supplied us with this narrative of family history:
My grandfather had three siblings, Terez, Eszter and Imre. My grandfather Sándor was the youngest, Imre the oldest. The family decided that Imre and Teréz would immigrate to America and send home the money they earned there. But love came, Teréz and Imre also met Hungarians living abroad [in Proctor], and although homesickness tormented them, they were never able to come home. This is how it happened that my father Sándor Vajda had seven first cousins born in America. God granted that ten years before his death I was able to take them to Vermont and meet his relatives. We also took soil from their father and mother’s graves to Teréz and Imre’s graves. Tears flowed…
Mama Terez [Theresa Kallen] wrote letters regularly, she reported everything about the birth of the five boys, the family, John’s work, the boys who participated in the war, how they flew over their homeland as pilots. But packages also came, and even dollars hidden in the letters arrived. My grandfather Sándor Vajda died young, but Terez wrote to my grandmother too. And Uncle Imre [Emery Vadja] wrote and so did his wife. When they died, Imre’s daughter Irén [Irene (Vajda) Skuba] took over the role, who corresponded with my father, and it is thanks to this relationship that we visited the relatives in 1997, when all seven cousins were still alive, and only Uncle Ernő [Ernest Kallen], who lives in Arizona, we did not meet. But when he found out that we were out there, he came to his mother’s hometown of Takácsi three times.
While the Kallen family knew a great deal about their grandmother’s side of the Vajda family, they knew little about John Kallen’s early life and whether his name had been changed. According to his marriage and death records, his parents were Andrew Kallen and Helen Boda. The key document that became the portal to his birthplace was his naturalization record. In July 1908, at the age of 18, John Kallen petitioned to become a United States citizen—his final swearing in took place in July 1914. John claimed to have been born in Csarnaho, Hungary, and sailed from Bremen, Germany, aboard the Kaiser Wilhelm in March 1906. A line-by-line search through the passenger manifest failed to find him. Like so many of his Hungarian compatriots, John found employment at the Vermont Marble Company. On May 28, 1917, John enlisted in the United States Navy and served as a Second Class Fireman aboard the ship South Carolina. He received an honorable discharge on August 12, 1919.
John and Theresa moved from Proctor to Middlebury, briefly to Swanton, and then to Florence. John worked 24 years for the Vermont Marble Company, and 14 years for the Lincoln Iron Works in Rutland before he retired in 1955. A stroke incapacitated him in the last years of life, but Theresa cared for him at home. On Sundays, one of his sons would take him for a drive. Their grandchildren recall their honesty, hard work, and their large gardens. Chris Kallen said, “Strawberries, at 25 cents a quart, paid their taxes.” John certainly instilled patriotism in their five sons, all of whom served in the military. On Veterans Day 2009, the last surviving brother, Ernest Kallen, a 20-year veteran of the U.S. Airforce, paid tribute to his brothers through a memorial in the Rutland Herald.
Now back to the subject of John Kallen’s name and origins. As we established in the Elnicki story, [Coming to America, No. 1] Hungary’s boundaries changed several times. The village of Csarnaho is now known as Cernochov, Chlumec [county] in Slovakia. In 1910, the village, once the domain of an abbey of nuns, counted 435 inhabitants. Knowing that János was John in Hungarian, and his father’s name, Andrew, was András, and allowing for spelling variations of Kallen, led me to find traces of his family in records that familysearch.org [The Church of Latter-Day Saints website], organized within its Slovakia resources. János Kalán was among the elder children of András Kalán and Ersébeth Boldé. I found Protestant baptismal records of a daughter Ersébeth and a son András. The Hungarian birth certificate of Maria Kalán, from 1903, also indicates the family belonged to the Lutheran Church. Members of the Kalán family had lived in the village since the middle of the 19th century. Returning to my search for John in a shipping manifest, I found fifteen-year-old, Janos Kalan aboard the German ship Main, sister ship to the Kaiser Wilhelm, with exactly the same dates of passage as found in the naturalization record. This completed a journey of almost five thousand miles for a brave teenager coming to America with the hope and promise of a better life.
Acknowledgments: Chris, Steven, and Rob Kallen; Deborah (Kallen) Reynolds, and György Vadja.
