Founder of the family
We will start the story about the Hapala family with the ancestor of the family, whose scribes recorded as Hapal (without the ending -a). However, his descendants were already written under the name Hapala.
Matěj Happal in the village of Střítež nad Ludinou emerges from the gloom of ancient ages as the first Hapala in Hranice. His name can be found first in the land registry and also in the concept of the town plan of the Hranice manor from 1663.
In the land register from 1669-1679 we find Matěj Happal, a half-owner in Střítež, and the previous holder is not mentioned. From this, we can conclude that Matěj was already sitting on this land in 1656, eight years after the end of the Thirty Years’ War. From the nearest parishes of Bělotín and Hranice, there are surviving registers from 1637 and 1625 respectively. Several explanations are offered:
in the (post)war years, the recording was not consistent
the family was of Protestant religion
the family was registered under a different surname
the family was registered in another nearby parish (Potštát and Drahotuše are the closest)
or Matěj Hapal settled in Střítez during the 30th war or rather just after it ended.According to Bohumír Indra, a local historian, the estates of Střítež and Drahotuš were devastated by the war, and most of the deserted land in the countryside was occupied quite quickly between 1649 and 1651, mostly by the German-speaking population from the neighboring mountain areas, which was spared from the marching armies and plundering.
second generation
From the marriage register of Střítež, we know that Matěj had sons Jiří, Adam, and Matěj and daughters Kateřina and Eva. Matěj Jr. did marry (4 August 1686) but apparently left no descendants. His widow Anna remarried on 29 January 1712 to Paul Poluwsky.
Genealogical research in this period is complicated by the incompleteness of the civil registers, but also by the variability of surnames. One person could easily be listed under different surnames.
We know that Jiří married Kateřina Nováková (25 January 1680) and Adam married Anna Hubalová (9 January 1684). From the land register, we can further deduce that Jiří Hapala married into Novák’s house number 65 and in 1720 he is already listed as deceased. The land register mentions a widow Anna (either a scribe’s mistake or she was Jiří’s second wife).
Adam’s family lived on number 51. (According to the Theresian Land Register this number was held around 1679 by Jan Hubala, Adam’s father-in-law.) Adam died before 1712, and his widow Anna remarried and died in 1732.
third generation
In the next generation, we find only a record from 1685 under the name Hapala about the birth of Anna, daughter of Jiří Hapala. In addition, however, we can also find the birth of Martin, the son of Jiří Novák, and another Martin, the son of Adam Hubala, in the registry of Střítež. The parish priest here used the surnames of their mothers (Katerina Novák and Anna Hubala). Thus, we have before us two Martins Hapala, cousins, born in Střítež at the end of the 17th century.
From the land register of the village of Střítež, we learn that both Martins Hapalas took over their father’s land on Christmas 1712, one on 23 December from his stepfather for 100 guldens, the other on 24 December from his living father for 60.
Since the former later pass the land to his son Jan Hapala, it must be Martin, son of Adam. This Martin married Rosina Pastyříková on 1 May 1712, with whom he had a daughter Marianna (1712), and a son Jan (1715). He died in Střítež in April 1749 at the age of 62.
The second Martin was married on 21 January 1714 in Kelč to Marianna Valuchová from Ústí. Three daughters and two sons were born to them in Ústí 18 between 1715 and 1727. We know nothing about the fate of the first four children. It is unlikely that they all lived to adulthood, but they are not recorded in the death registers of either the parish of Hranice or Kelč nor in the marriage registers. This is all the more strange because the Kelč parish priest at the time was very keen on having many entries in the death register. So much so that between 1711 and 1714 he recorded fictitious deaths and omitted baptism records. By this deception, he tried to give the impression that his parish was declining in numbers and thus prevent its division. The last of the children, Antonín, lived to adulthood, and the Hapala tree grew mightily thanks to him.
Strangely enough, Martin sold the Střítež land to Jan Číhal in 1723, nine years after he left for Ústí, 12 kilometers away. Although he was formally its holder at that time, his father Jiří may have continued to farm the land (until 1720) and Martin’s sister Anna also lived there. She did not marry until June 1720 at the age of 35 to the widower Jiří Horák of Velká. According to the Střítež land records, Martin must have had at least one other sister. Martin Hapala died in Ústí on New Year’s Day 1758 at the age of 76. Marianna followed him 10 years later at the age of about 80.
fourth generation
Antonín Hapala (Ústí Branch)
(1727-1775)
Antonín Hapala (23) married Marianna Vavříková (20) from Zbrašov 21 on the day of the 130th anniversary of the Battle of White Mountain, on 8 November 1750. In 1758 the old farmer Martin died. Ústí 18 was referred to as a garden in the terminology of the time, which means that it comprised fields of a quarter of a lane. Antonín was probably an only child, the only one of his siblings to survive to adulthood, and therefore a universal heir. He, therefore, inherited his father’s land without having to pay shares to his co-heirs and as a consequence was not burdened with debts. Marianne’s brother Josef Vavřík, on the other hand, lived on number 21 in Zbrašov, which had been the home of the large Vavřík family for several generations. Josef was heavily indebted, as he had to pay off the land to his and even his father’s siblings.
The solution to this situation could have been to cede the larger Zbrašov land to the Hapalas and the Vavříks would have moved to Ústí. However, grandmother Marina Hapalová did not want to leave her native Valuch farm in Ústí and wished to stay there. When she died in May 1768, nothing prevented the exchange (frejmark, as it was called then).
Antonín Hapala bought the land of Zbrašov from his brother-in-law Josef Vavřík for 300 guldens. The purchase of the Ústí land by Vavřík was not recorded in the books at all, as there was nothing to pay. While the property in Ústí was worth 100 guldens in 1714, the Zbrasov garden was valued at 500 guldens in the same year. Antonín’s father, Martin, increased the value of the land in Ústí by 100 guldens by buying himself out of the obligation to pay half-yearly rent to the authorities.
The last three children were born to the Hapalas in Zbrašov and the Hapala family remained there until 1990 (222 years). Before that, the Vavříks had lived at number 21 since the end of the 30 Years War, from about 1651, when Jan Vavřík of Rakov (great-grandfather of Marianna née Hapala) married Anna, the daughter of the Zbrašov town clerk Pavel Král. And it can be assumed that the Král family lived on the same number before that.
Antonín and Marianna had a total of nine sons and two daughters. Remarkably, six sons and one daughter lived to adulthood and started their own families. With the infant mortality rates of the time, this was not a common occurrence, although, the Vavříks had a similar track record. The godparents of the children were Jan Libosvár, a miller from Ústí, and Marianna Váhalová, the wife of Antonín Váhala, a farmer in Ústí, or the partners of those two.
At the time of his children’s births, Antonín Hapala is mostly listed as a peasant (rusticus), once as a house holder (gazarius, 1765), and once as a reeve (iudex, 1755). Thus, Antonín was a reeve in Ústí, but probably only for a short time, 1755-1756 at most. He was the first, but not the last, reeve in the family.
With so many descendants, it was necessary to think strategically. The age of maturity was then 21. And at that age, each of the sons was to marry and leave home. The idea was to find a bride with her own land. This was the case for the first four sons, with Antonín and Jakub marrying a widow. Tomáš inherited the parental estate and had to pay off his siblings except for the eldest Jiří. (He had probably received his share earlier so that he could buy land in Opatovice in 1774.) The youngest František bought a small land in Valšovice before his marriage.
In 1778, when their daughter Apolena was 17 years old, her parents married her to František Směták, the hereditary reeve in Podhoří. Their son František Směták lived to the age of 98 and was the last reeve in Podhoří (until the abolition of serfdom in 1848).
Mother Marianna Hapala died in June 1793 at the age of 63, and was thus able to oversee the marriages of all her children. Her husband Antonín preceded her by 18 years († September 1775).
After her husband’s death, Marianna married Josef Ochmann from Černotín. Josef Ochmann outlived his wife by six years and during that time he managed to remarry and his only son Josef (1796) was born at Zbrašov 21.
Jan Hapala, carpenter (Střítež branch)
(1715-1783)
Jan Hapala was born in December 1715 in Střítež. With his wife Marianna, he had six sons and four daughters. According to the registers he was a carpenter.
The eldest son Jiří, also a carpenter, married Magdalena, widow of the miller Jan Ploščic, in July 1768. Thanks to this, he acquired the Střítež mill for a period of 20 years. A carpenter and a miller was an advantageous combination of skills and profession. But misfortune was not far away. At the end of winter 1770 (9 March), Jiří was checking or repairing the mill wheel. The wheel suddenly ran and crushed him. The newly minted miller Jiří (21) was dead on the spot. His only child, his daughter Marianna, was not yet one year old.
Jan’s youngest son Josef lived 43 years of childless marriage. At the end of his life, he managed to marry a second time and beget a son who also started a family.
Through the middle son, Tomáš, the Střítež branch of the Hapalas continues to this day.
fifth generation
Ústí Branch
Jiří Hapala
(1752-1818)
Jiří was a first-born child. He was born a year and a half after his parents’ wedding, at the end of April 1752. The birthright did not, however, entitle him to take over the farm, as we would expect today. On the contrary, it was to fall to the younger of the brothers. Jiří was expected to be “provided for” by the time his parents handed over the farm and retired. The idea was to find a bride with her own land, as both Jiří and his brothers did.
marriages
In July 1772, only twenty years old, Jiří married Veronika Vašíková, five years older, in Opatovice. Veronika died very soon, half a year later.
Jiří (21) marries for the second time a quarter of a year after the death of his first wife, in April 1773, and marries Anna Vávrová (about 26 years old), the daughter of Matyáš Vávra, a peasant from his native Zbrašov. The following year Jiří buys land with a house number 49 in Opatovice from Antonín Malina for 60 guldens. The Hapala family lived there until the beginning of the 20th century.
descendants
Jiří and Anna have 10 children, including nine daughters! Six daughters died in infancy, under the age of seven.
Marianna, the eldest daughter, married Josef Sedlář in Hlinsko pod Hostýnem, Anna married Kašpar Hrubec, a farmer from Černotín, in 1806, and Viktoria married František Nehyba, a farmer from Skalička, in 1819. The only son Josef married Anna Lacinová. In 1824, Josef joined a small rebellion of the peasants against the landlord, when they no longer wanted to suffer the shepherding of the lord’s sheep on their land (more precisely, the land that the peasants rented from the lord). Jiří was punished for this with five-day imprisonment and can be described with exaggeration as the first known Hapala-rebel.
The Hapalas from this branch have lived not only in Hranice and Přerov but also in eastern Bohemia, Pilsen, and Slovakia. Some of the descendants were blacksmiths and scientists in the field of chemistry and biochemistry.
Antonín Hapala, Jr.
(1755-1819)
The second eldest son Antonín was born in May 1755, baptized in Posvátno (today part of Kelč), he spent his childhood first in Ústí at number 18, later at Zbrašov 21.
marriages
Like his elder brother Jiří, Antonín was to find a bride with a farm of her own. One such was available in his native Ústí at number 19. And so in 1776 Antonín (21) marries Anna Ličmanová. During the next five years, two sons and two daughters are born to them. Anna dies seven years after the wedding.
Antonín married for the second time at the end of February 1784 to Barbara Pitronová (20) from Opatovice.
They were separated 22 years later, in February 1806, by Barbara’s death (42). During their life together, they had 4 daughters and 3 sons. The last two children are twins, of whom the boy Antonín dies within a month of birth. Remarkably, the sexes of the children born in both marriages alternate perfectly.
For the third and last time, Antonín (51) married Marianna, widow of Florian Nesvadba of Hluzov, in mid-April 1806. Eight children are alive at this time, the first two from his first marriage. The eldest, František (28), is married and lives in nearby Posvátno. He is followed by Anna (26) and Barbora’s (and Antonín’s) own children Marianna (21), Josef (20), Johanna (18), Jan (15), and Barbora (13), and the youngest Veronika (8).
With his third wife, Antonín has no other children and when he dies in 1819 at the age of 64, all his children had reached adulthood. The third wife outlives Antonín by 12 years.
descendants
The Hapala family continued in Antonín’s branch in the 19th and 20th centuries through his three sons, František, Josef and Jan. Josef’s descendants spread to Přerov, Kroměříž, Brno, Pardubice and Germany. Jan’s descendants lived in Lipník nad Bečvou and Vienna.
Josef’s great-grandson Augustin Hapala worked as an evangelical priest in Ukraine in the 1920s and later returned to Moravia with his family, while another great-grandson Karel Hapala died in 1915 on the battlefield of the First World War in the Slovak Poloniny on Kozialata Hill.
Jan Hapala
(1758-1815)
Jan Hapala was born at the beginning of November 1758 in Ústí 18, where he also spent the first ten years of his life, then he grew up in Zbrašov for the next 11 years and in 1779, at the age of 21, he married Marianna Ličmanová (about 22) at the farm and house number 50 in Velká u Hranice.
They had “only” four children, two daughters and two sons, born between 1791 and 1802. Jan died in mid-February 1815 at the age of 57. Marianna remarries in September to the widower Jakub Novák.
descendants
Descendants of Jan Hapala live today in villages around Hranice. Two of his great-grandsons settled in Vienna at the end of the 19th century and it is possible that their descendants still live in Austria today.
Jan’s son Tomáš married his half-sister (daughter of his stepfather) Anna Nováková from number 44. In Velká he held the office of the reeve from 1820 until 1842 when he was deposed due to complaints from the peasants. Interestingly, Tomáš’s uncle, also Tomáš Hapala, was a reeve in Zbrašov, his grandfather Antonín in Ústí and his cousin and uncle Směták in Podhoří.
Jakub Hapala, carpenter
(1763-1822)
childhood
Jakub had perhaps the most moving destiny of his siblings. He was born in 1763 in Ústí at number 18 and baptized in the nearby village of Posvátno (today part of Kelč), but spent most of his childhood and adolescence in Zbrašov in house 21. He was 12 years old when his father died (autumn 1775). Less than a year later, his mother Marianna married Josef Ochmann.
first wedding
Jakub took his time to get married. While all his brothers were already married at the age of 21 and his sister Apolena got married even at 17, Jakub turned 22 at the beginning of July 1785 and was still single. However, the opportunity presented itself only 10 days later.
In the village behind the hill, in Valšovice, Antonín Král, a farmer on number 1, the largest land in the village, had just died at the age of 60. He left behind an eight-year-old son Josef, a daughter Barbara and a wife Kateřina in her third month of pregnancy. It was necessary to find a new farmer for the land and a groom for the widow Katerina.
Valšovice estate nr. 1 was a rich farmstead with extensive fields. Originally it was a manor, or manor farm, later (probably in the first half of the 17th century) sold to the serfs. Farmers from this land were referred to in the registers as free peasants (Freybauer). They were probably exempted from some of the duties that most serfs were burdened with, such as free labour. Still, we can guess that Jakub was not happy about this lot. He was to marry a woman who could have been his mother. When the parish priest married them in the parish church in Paršovice on 6 September 1785, he was 22, she was 41 and five months pregnant. The parish priest entered Kateřina in the register as 13 years younger, i.e. 28 years old.
Jakub was to be only a temporary farmer on the land, to take proper care of it, and after his stepson Joseph becomes an adult, to hand over the whole farm to him. In order to prevent future disputes, the agreement between Kateřina and Jakub was recorded in the Book of Marriage Contracts and briefly in the land register. Jakub was to use the farm for 16 years, i.e. until 1801. In return, Jakub was to receive a lifetime residence (Ausgedinge) on the farm.
handing over the Valšovice estate to the stepson
The handover of the land took place a few years earlier. Josef Král married in January 1796 at the age of 19 to Kateřina Novotná from Paršovice and his step-grandfather (step-father’s step-father) Josef Ochmann was his best man. In the same year his first son, František was born, and in the following quarter of a century, 15 more children were born. The settlement between Jakub Hapala and his stepson Josef Král in the following year was probably hastened by the weakening of Josef’s mother Kateřina. She wanted to be sure that everything would go smoothly and that her son would not be deprived of anything. Just after the New Year 1798, she died.
second wedding
After 13 years, the childless, widowed Jakub had the opportunity to remarry, which happened only a month later. On 6 February 1798 he married Kateřina Kuličková (21) from Rakov. Jakub’s best man is none other than his stepson Josef Král, which shows the good relationship between them.
Jakub and his family continued to live on the free farm in Valšovice for the following years, where six children were born between 1799 and 1814. Four of them die shortly after birth.
This period is marked by the Napoleonic wars (1803-1815) and the associated hardships, including inflation, conscription, and fighting, and campaigns by allied and enemy troops across the territory.
purchase and loss of land in Opatovice
Apparently, the parents did not intend to stay in a “comfortable” Ausgedinge, as they would have nothing to leave their children. And the question is to what extent life in there was comfortable for a family with two children. It can be assumed that they had been saved meticulously to buy their own land and may well have already put away most of the money they needed. Here, however, they were cruelly affected by the bankruptcy of the Austrian Empire, which occurred on 15 March 1811. On that day, the savings lost 80% of their value…
Jakub and Kateřina did not give up and decided to bet everything on one card. At the end of 1815, Jakub had his right of residence paid out by Joseph Král, which earned him 750 guldens. And the following year he bought from František Machanec the land with house number 16 in the village of Opatovice for 2420 guldens, of which he paid half and had to repay the rest. The purchase entailed a number of obligations (payment of the former owner’s debts), not to mention taxes and tithes, as well as a lifetime annuity for the seller’s parents and payment for their funeral. One the witnesses of the sale on Jakub’s side was again Josef Král.
It soon became clear that Jakub had cut himself too big a slice with this purchase, as he was unable to pay the amount owed. In the spring of the following year, the land went into foreclosure and was bought by Antonín Klíč from Středolesí for half the price. After satisfying all creditors, Jakub is left with 116 guldens!
end of life
The execution impoverished Jakub’s family and they fell from peasant status to the status of sub-peasants, i.e. landless people who had to live in rented accommodation and earn their living by working for other peasants.
Apparently, Jacob was trying to support his family with carpentry work. He is listed as a carpenter in the birth record of his great-grandson Heřman. Indirectly, this is also evidenced by the valuable information we have about Jakub’s death from the Drahotuše death registry of 1822. The parish priest recorded that Jakub was Inmann (i.e. a tenant) from Velká number 86, he died of a concussion and his corpse was forensically examined. Forensic examinations were not carried out for natural deaths and the concussion mentioned suggests that Jakub died as a result of an accident. Fortunately, the parish priest added an explanatory note: “he fell from the roof” (vom Dach gestürzt).
Jakub was 59 years old, and his widow Kateřina died five years later of consumption (tuberculosis). She was survived by her son Jan (21) and daughter Anna (13).
descendants
After his birth in 1806, his son John disappears from the records for 30 years when he reappears in the Upper Austrian town of Gmunden in the foothills of the Alps. He settled there as a blacksmith and married Anna Aicher in 1836. His descendants live in Austria till the present.
Daughter Anna appears again in Valšovice at the beginning of 1839, when her illegitimate son František Hapala is born. A year later she married František Pavelka, a local labourer, in Hranice. They had several children, most of whom died soon after. The only child who has a family of his own is František Hapala, often called Pavelka. František is trained as a chimney sweeper, which will ensure a good living in Hranice for him and his large family.
One of Jakub’s great-grandchildren, Jindřich Hapala, worked in Olomouc at the time of the establishment of the Czechoslovak Republic, where he had the confidence of both the Czech and German (Austrian) parties, which helped him in his role as a mediator in the transfer of power in the regional capital. This earned him the naming of a street in Olomouc after him. Hapala Street existed in Olomouc until the 1980s when it gave way to new construction. Typical occupations in this branch are chimney sweeper (4 times), blacksmith (3 times), and dentist or stomatologist (3 times).
Tomáš Hapala, reeve
(1765-1811)
Tomáš was born in mid-December 1765 in Ústí in house No. 18 and was baptized a week before Christmas Eve in Posvátno (today part of Kelč). When he was three years old, the family moved to his mother’s estate at Zbrašov, No. 21. At the age of 16, he witnessed a social transformation in the country that improved the position of the common people, namely the abolition of serfdom by a patent of Emperor Joseph II in 1781. This changed the relationship between the landlord (the legal owner of the land) and the serfs, in particular the abolition of slavery. Thomas himself later became an official of the landed gentry.
Tomáš was the second youngest of the siblings and he inherited his parents’ land 21, which had been occupied by the Vavřík family for several generations (his mother was born Vavřík). This house then remained in the possession of the Hapala family until the 1990s, for a total of 8 generations and 222 years.
the reeve at Zbrašov
Tomáš held the reeve’s office in Zbrašov. The bailiff or vogt was a lordly official, a mediator between the landlord and the subjects in a given village. He was responsible for collecting taxes and benefits in kind, fulfilling worker’s duties, and judging minor neighbourly disputes. With the abolition of serfdom in 1848, the role of the bailiff ceased to exist and the first village mayors were elected instead. While the later mayor represented and worked for the citizens, the bailiff primarily worked for the landlord (the nobility). The bailiffs were certainly respected people, but at the same time feared.
Tomáš’s father had already been a reeve, at least for a short time. And Tomáš’s only sister Apolena married František Směták, the hereditary reeve in Podhoří.
Tomáš married in May 1786 Veronika (17), the daughter of farmer Josef Bílý from Černotín. Tomas died in January 1811 at the age of 46. At that time his only son Josef reached adulthood. His siblings: Jan (18), Cyril (16), Veronika (13), František (11), Balthasar (9), Tomáš (7), and Pavel (5).
They had nine sons and three daughters. As with his father, one daughter and six sons lived to adulthood! The sons Balthasar and Pavel married but left no descendants to start families of their own. The branch of the third son, Tomáš, died out after the sword in the late 19th century. The fourth son, František, probably settled in Hranice, where he bought a house on the lower arcade, no. 26, and thus became a citizen of Hranice. He, both his children, and his wife died in the middle of the 19th century.
descendants
Josef relocated to Klokočí. Josef’s son Jan laid the foundation of the teaching tradition in his family. He himself practiced his profession in the village of Velká for 50 years and was awarded the Silver Cross of Merit.
One of his descendants, Richard Hapala, was killed in World War I. His nephew, also Richard Hapala, was killed in 1941 in the uniform of an RAF airman in England. Not only is there a street in Brno named after him, but also a new city park (formerly Hády quarry) in 2020. One of his descendants, Milan Hapala, went to the USA in 1938, where he became a university professor. Another, Zdeněk Hapala, also known as Hapala-Kopecký, was active in the anti-Nazi resistance and was a well-known puppeteer in Český Těšín in the 1950s to 1970s. Other descendants live in Australia.
To this day, there are living Hapalas descended from one of the three oldest sons of Tomáš: Josef, Jan and Cyril. Cyril took over his father’s estate in Zbrasov. Jan married into Velká. The descendants of both of them still live in Hranice.
Antonín Hapala (* 1829), the grandson of the reeve Tomáš Hapala (* 1829) from number 9, served as mayor of Zbrašov for one year from 1891 to October 1892. Another mayor of Zbrašov was Tomáš’ great-great-grandson Jan Hapala (1902-1982) around 1942.
František Hapala
(1769-1847)
František’s two youngest brothers died within half a year of their birth, so he himself was the benjamin of the family. He was the only one of his surviving siblings born (in June 1769) in the family’s new home, at Zbrašov 21, i.e. the land of his grandparents Vavřík.
His father died when he was six years old. Like his brothers, he was married at the age of 21 on 21 June 1790 to Veronika Nesvadbová (25) from Hluzov 17. (The marriage register lists František as “from Valšovice 9”.) The family line of the Hapalas continued at number 10 until the middle of the 20th century.
In total, František and Veronika had six daughters and five sons. Of these, four daughters and one son lived to adulthood.
When František (77) died in 1847, the parish priest entered his parents in the register incorrectly. He listed Jan Hapala, a farmer from Valšovice as his father (but there was no such person), and Veronika G. from Hluzov (here he probably confused his wife with his mother).
descendants
In the 20th century, the descendants of František’s son Matěj settled in Hranice as well as in Přerov and Prague. Matěj’s grandson Rudolf Hapala got to Russia before the First World War, where, according to family tradition (nephew and great-niece), he married a noblewoman. Photographs he sent to his family in Hranice give a wealthy impression. He allegedly had a son, Ivan, who died during World War II. Their further fate is unknown. Matěj’s great-grandson Josef Hapala, who was to inherit the family land in Valšovice, was killed in 1917 on the Malga di Ronchetto battlefield in the Veneto region of Italy.
Matěj’s son František left his native Valšovice in the middle of the 19th century for nearby Hranice. Another similarly aged František Hapala, grandson of Jakub Hapala, who came from Valšovice, lived in Hranice at that time. They were second cousins. In their families, the awareness of (indeterminate) kinship was maintained until the end of the 20th century. Their common ancestor was already 250 years away.
Representatives of this branch include researchers in physics and chemistry.
Střítež branch
Tomáš Hapala
(1754-1818)
Tomáš Hapala was born in 1754 in Střítež, probably at number 51. At the age of 23, in May 1777, he married Veronika Klumparová (18), also from Střítež. At that time he is already documented at number 51.
He dies in 1818 and by then has six daughters and two sons. However, the younger son Josef (22) dies as a soldier in the Napoleonic Wars in 1809. This leaves only one male descendant, Václav.
descendants
The Hapala family continues through Václav’s sons Josef and Tomáš. Their descendants still live today in Střítež (more than 360 years), but also in Jeseník and Prague. Václav’s great-grandson Rajmund Hapala died after the end of the First World War, in November 1918, as a result of injuries sustained in battle.
Josef Hapala
(1759-1831)
Josef Hapala was born in January 1759 in Střítež. At the age of 19, in January 1779, he married Barbara Janíčková. They did not have any children. After the death of his wife, Josef remarried (43 years after his first marriage) in February 1822 to Magdalena Haračová. The bride was about 40 years old and Josef himself 63. At the end of October of the same year, however, their son Josef was born! He lost his father at the age of 9. He trained as a wheelwright and settled in Nový Jičín, where he married Marie Jakšíková in 1847.
descendants
Josef’s son, the master wheelwright (Wagnermeister) Josef Hapala, had seven children in Nový Jičín in the second half of the 19th century, including two sons, at least the eldest of whom, also Josef, lived to adulthood and started a family. It is not yet clear whether the family survived into the 20th century.