A transcription of pages 195-469,
Family Histories from the Verdigre Centennial Book
Thanks to the Verdigre Library and its volunteers for making this available.
 
The index below only includes the husband and wife for each family.
The maiden name for the wife is used if listed.
For other names, use the search on the Home Page.

Index's A-I, J-P, & Q-Z

EDWARD AND ELSIE [TICHY] DOBRY

Edward Dobry, son of Albert and Marie Eret Dobry, was born in Saunders County October 29, 1897. In 1907 he accompanied his parents to this northern border county. It might have been his first train ride. After attending various schools in Saunders and Knox counties and receiving an eighth-grade education, he attended an automotive school in Omaha in 1918. This training did not lead to a job as a mechanic, however, but it probably helped him later in servicing his automobile and tractor, as every farmer did. As it turned out, he was the son left on the farm. Since his parents did not drive, he was the family chauffer. The first car came in the teens, but the first tractor - a Fordson - came a little later, to be followed by a McCormick Deering Farmall with huge lugs which certainly would not have been allowed on a county road today. For most tasks a team of horses (never mules) served very well, and then early tractor machinery was converted from horse-drawn implements.

If the 1920s were busy years, there were fun times as well. Edward had been enrolled in the ZCBJ Lodge Bila Hora No. 5, and when the English-speaking Lodge American was established, he became a member and a minor officer. Earlier in life he had been a member of the local Czech youth club, the CNZ. One can imagine him marching with the others from Nikl Hall to the Bohemian National Cemetery half a mile away to take part in Decoration Day ceremonies there. He also played the mandolin; the Dobrys had some musical talent and some enthusiasm.

On September 9, 1930, Edward married Elsie Tichy at Yankton, South, Dakota. For a wedding trip the couple traveled by auto down the Iowa side of the Missouri River. The Depression had begun the previous October but everyone expected it to be over in a year or two. Edward had just taken over the farm for himself and doubtless everything would be all right.

Elsie was the youngest daughter of Anton Tichy and Anna Holan, born August 6, 1906. Her oldest sister was then almost 25 and the mother of two children. Her father was close to retirement. When she was a few months old, her parents moved into the village of Niobrara where she was a town girl, not a farm girl. In 1911 she started to school in the new building. Her special friends in school were Marian Cash and Elsie Holan, who was the daughter of her first cousin but older than she. That was a common story: she had no younger cousins, some were as much as 36 years older. She did well at school and after graduation she went to work at a bakery and kept house for her father, retired and widowed when she was 12. She always remembered the costs of her mother’s final illness (and must have thought of this often in her own long struggle with death) for she was quite a thrifty person. She was in a position to be so because she kept the household’s books. She had inherited money from her mother and property and promissory notes from others given to her by her father.

How she and her husband first met is uncertain, but the Jelen territory was not unfamiliar to her. Her sister Rose had married Charles Liska, who kept the Jelen Store during the early and middle 1920s. By 1930, the Liskas were gone from Jelen, farming at Dorsey and then at Middlebranch. In any event, she left home, family, and friends to come to Jelen. In late years she would stop to talk to people who were evidently relatives but she would never say who they were or what the kinship was, that was something one was expected to know.

The Depression did not end soon. Instead it worsened. Drought, grasshoppers, and anthrax added to the costs of life in those cheap years. In the middle of one of the worst years, 1933, their only child, Ronald, was born. Fields turned to sand. Dust blew and in the fall the tumbleweeds drifted. On autumn nights piles of thistles would be burned,. Edward looked for ways to supplement the family income. He was a Triple A lineman for a time and then sold hybrid seed corn, which was just coming into use because it was more highly drought-and-disease resistant than open-pollinated corn. Planting hybrids, however, meant buying seed corn every year and trips in the automobile to take orders. It was a good corn - it yielded well and Edward once won a prize on an acreage he had.

During these years the Farmers Union was important. Edward was an officer of the local Farmers Union, Riverside No. 137 (Elsie sometime, too), and a delegate to district and state conventions - a national once. In 1938 when Ronald entered school at Cottonwood Row District No. 27, Edward became a member of the school board. He was still that, as moderator, when the school was dissolved at the end of the 1960s. He was also chairman of the Jelen Cemetery Association, a position he held at his death.

In 1941 the Dobrys bought a 1937 Chevrolet. It served them during the war and beyond when there was gas rationing and cars were not being manufactured. With the war came the rains and general prosperity for farmers. The Farmall was replaced by a Co-op tractor after the war and when it proved to have inadequate power, a John Deere took its place. A quarter section of land left to brothers and sisters was purchased share by share. An adjacent 80 acres of pasture, the South Half of the Southwest Quarter of Section 32, were acquired when they became available; it was too good a chance to pass up. But the fact remains that when the war ended, Edward was approaching 50. He was too old to develop a large scale operation of the kind which became common in the 1950s.

There were other responsibilities. For 12 years Edward served as a member of the board of directors of the Farmers Co-op in Verdigre, principally as secretary. He became a fifty-year member of the ZCBJ. Elsie was a founding member of the Helping Hand Club.

In 1962 Elsie was found to be suffering from cancer. Already ill, she had participated with great enjoyment in all of the activities of Verdigre’s Diamond Jubilee, saving souvenirs and mementos, including all of the newspapers of the period. (These newspapers later proved of value to the Centennial Committee.) She had an operation but it was unable to arrest the course of the disease. On February 8, 1964, she died, after almost nine months in the hospital. She was buried in a lot in the Jelen Cemetery, with her husband’s parents.

After Elsie’s death, Edward, now retired and with his farm rented out, became executive director-manager of the new Czech Alps low-rent housing complex, serving as contracting officer during its construction. He was still executive director on March 28, 1977, when he was stricken, probably with an aneurysm, in his office. He died the next day. He was buried in the Bohemian National Cemetery at Jelen in a lot with his wife and parents.

Pages 233, 234