Louis Paulik and Julie Lison Family

Details of the family of Julie Lison and Louis Paulik have been gathered from the public documents they left behind.  We know that Julianna Lisoňová was born in Levoča on February 29, 1889 and baptized on March 2nd, the legitimate daughter of Jozef Lisoň, room painter from Levoča, a Roman Catholic, and Katarína Sekeráková from Bajerovce in Šariš, a Greek Catholic.

Julie Lison Paulik and her son, Stephen

Julie Lison Paulik and her

grandson, Robert

Photos courtesy of Robert Paulik

The family lived at house #65 in Levoča and her godparents were Vojtech Kovač and his wife, Suzanna, confirming the fact that Jozef Lisoň’s sister, Suzanna, eventually married Vojtech Kovač, the father of her two sons.

 

The next pieces of information come from her arrival in the United States.  The passenger arrival list of the ship Kaiser Wilhelm II which left the German port of Bremen on November 3 and arrived in New York on November 11, 1903 lists Julia Liszon, a fifteen year old single female servant who can read and write.  She was an ethnic Slovak citizen of Hungary who was born in Lőcse and was headed to Hazelton, Pennsylvania to meet with her uncle, Peter Szekera with $36 in her pocket.  Szekera would be close to the Hungarian spelling of her mother’s maiden name, Sekerák, which would lead one to believe that Peter was her mother’s brother.  A search for Peter Sekerak in Hazelton in 1903 yielded no evidence of him however there are Federal Census returns from 1900 and 1910 listing a Peter Sekerak as a miner in Rock Springs, Wyoming. He arrived in the United States in either 1885 or 1888, depending on which census return is consulted. His wife, Mary, was also a Slovak immigrant and their daughter, Suzy, was born in 1897 in Pennsylvania. While there is no record of Julia staying with the family, it is evident that they settled, at least for a short while, in Pennsylvania before moving west. When I first began my family research by asking close relatives about what they knew, I asked my father’s brother, Fran, about his Aunt Julie. He said that he heard that she headed out west to help run a boarding house for miners. This nugget of truth, combined with Julia’s passenger arrival information and the Federal Census returns supports the possibility of Julia travelling to Wyoming after her arrival in the United States.

 

Information from Robert Paulik indicates that Julie was hired by a well-to-do family who engaged her services as a nanny for their children.  It is told that the family travelled to Europe and took Julie along with them.  Eventually she settled in New Kensington, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh.  There she married a fellow Slovak immigrant, Louis Paulik, on January 2, 1911 as confirmed by the marriage register at Mount St. Peter’s church in New Kensington. The 1910 Federal Census return for the family, however, indicates that they were in their first year of marriage and their son, Stephen L., was 4 months old.