Chicago's South Side Czech Communities

Starting in the ealy 1880's, about 10 years after the Chicago Fire, Czech immigrants began to move from the area of Praha (Taylor, Dekoven, Bunker, Liberty street area) to two South Side communities:
-- the Back of the Yards neighborhood, near what is now 50th and Damen
-- Grand Crossing ("na Křižovatce" = "on the crossing" in Czech), just northeast of 79th and Cottage Grove

By 1900, the Grand Crossing Czech Community was a stable community that remained stable until the 1950's -- possibly the largest Czech community in Chicago to remain so long where they had settled so early. In spite of this, histories of the Czechs in Chicago often completely ignore or greatly under-represent this thriving long-lived Grand Crossing Czech community.

So these web pages are intended to document the community -- in effect creating a documentary reconstruction of the Grand Crossing Czech community. The documents thus far researched (but not all yet posted to the web site) are: censuses; city directory; "Denni Hlasatel" newspaper obituaries; birth, marriage, and death records, family records and photographs. So this will ultimately be a very detailed documentary portrait of the community.

Navigating within the web site

Use the links at the top of the page to navigate to the full introduction or to the specific years of research or to the web page of the families and their connections. So far, only the 1900 research page has begun. And while the 1900 research is not yet completed, the page has a great deal of valuable information.