Jan Trnka was baptized on 12 September 1757 in Zaječice, a small village in the Chrudim district of Bohemia, the son of Karel Trnka and his wife Catharina. He was the eldest of nine children born to the couple over the following eighteen years, and he grew up in the middle of it at Zaječice house 48, the farmstead his father held as a rusticus.

For a long time this beginning was invisible to the researchers who came looking for it. A 1998 letter from the regional archive said plainly that Jan’s birth could not be searched because his parents were unknown, and that guess — never a search — hardened over the following decades into an assumed birth year of about 1763. It sent every later search to the wrong shelf. The 1757 entry sat on a page beside another Trnka baptism that had already been logged as relevant, and was passed over for years for reasons no more dramatic than a badly formed capital letter: a scribe’s C, read first as a P, then as a K, before it was finally read correctly as Karel. When it was, the man in the register turned out to be five years older than the family had believed, married at twenty-five rather than twenty, and never in need of the outside search that had been proposed for him.

Marriage and Household

On 2 March 1783, Jan married Kateřina, daughter of the late Martin Nepivoda, at Zaječice. He was recorded as a textor — a weaver — a craft he pursued alongside the ordinary agricultural work of the household. Kateřina had been born on 21 October 1765, also in Zaječice, making her a few years younger than her new husband. Her father was already dead by the time of the marriage, but the Nepivoda family was large and prominent in the village, and the two families had already been intermarrying for two generations before this wedding took place.

In April 1788, Jan’s father Karel died at house 48, at about sixty-three years of age, and the farmstead passed to his son already living there. Jan had married into the household five years earlier; now he became its head outright, the same house he would occupy for the rest of his life.

From Weaver to Village Judge

Sometime after the birth of his daughter Anna in 1794, Jan made a significant change in station. The register shows him rising from textor to iudex — the village judge and headman of Zaječice — a position conferred by the community rather than inherited, and answerable to the manorial lord. The office carried real weight: the iudex oversaw the collection of dues, administered communal obligations, settled minor disputes, and represented the village in its dealings with the wider district. Jan held the post for at least fifteen years, appearing as iudex in the records from 1802 through 1818 — a village does not leave a man in that chair for a decade and a half unless it trusts him.

Throughout these years Jan was a constant presence at other families’ weddings, standing as first witness — the position of honor — again and again: in 1802, 1807, 1808, 1814, 1816, 1817, and 1818. As judge, as witness, and as neighbor and brother-in-law, Jan would have stood at most of the burials and baptisms that touched his wife’s family across these years.

Closing the Record

Kateřina died on 28 March 1813, predeceasing her husband by a decade. Jan’s daughter Anna married František Černý in February 1821 under a formal dispensation — and where earlier accounts of this family could only note that the dispensation implied some undefined kinship between the two households, it can now be read for what it actually recorded: Anna’s father was a grandson of Karel Trnka Sr. through Karel Jr., placing bride and groom within the second degree of consanguinity, exactly as the dispensation specifies.

Jan Trnka died on 28 July 1823, at Zaječice house 48 — the same house he had married into forty years before, taken over from his father, and never left. The register gives his age as sixty-six, close enough to the sixty-five years and ten months separating his 1757 baptism from this final entry that the two records confirm one another. Two of his children had already been born at Chrast, and it was to Chrast that his descendants through Anna eventually moved, and from which his great-grandson Frank Cerny emigrated to the United States around 1871.