The Story of Carl
Maybe I am alone in this. As a young boy when I asked my father about where our family came from, h e would tell me what he knew, which only went back as far as his grandfather, who immigrated to the United States prior to the First World War. My aunts both researched the family tree, exploring the various feeders to the family back to the colonial period, with one exception, the Baksa’s. For my entire life there has been an impenetrable wall in the research named Matias Baksa. We know that the family is of Magyar descent. The Magyars are an Asiatic tribe, a branch of the Huns, who arrived in Europe during the later Roman Empire. This information was fuel to the fire of my childhood brain but the stories I dreamed of were not based in truth. I know of at least one other man who faced a similar dilemma, my father-in-law. He was abandoned by his mother and lost his father all by the age of eight. He told his children a...