Texas is the third largest state in the U.S. The distance between Houston and El Paso is half the distance between Houston and LA. When I was nine, we drove to Colorado through the Texas Panhandle. It took 18 hours, and we spent the first 12 just getting out of Texas. All of this is to say that Texas is big, and it can be hard to determine what exactly I mean by Central Texas. For the purposes of this post, I am referring to the area between Houston, San Antonio, and Austin as well as the Texas Hill Country which begins around Austin and stretches to the Rio Grande.
These areas were home to a lot of immigrants from Germany and Eastern Europe. This is evident when I take road trips and pass through towns like New Braunfels, Schulenberg, Fredericksberg, Weimar, and Gruene (pronounced like the color "green"). Nestled in these towns are the "Painted Churches" constructed and painted by these immigrants even if a bishop wouldn't get to their town for several years. You can visit the original general stores, antique shops filled with German trinkets, and weathered dance halls that play mixes of country music and folk dances. On your way to all of these places, you make your nonnegotiable stop at a kolache bakery (A Czech delicacy that has either fruit or sausage in the middle surrounded by puffy dough, fan favorites in my family that make an appearance at every Thanksgiving).
It was to this region that Antonin Hajovsky and Johanna Stavinoha, my second-great-grandparents on Hank Hajovsky's line, immigrated in late 1870s. They were first cousins from Ostrava in the Czech Republic who married and had twelve children. Antonin worked as a saddle maker, and Johanna maintained a community garden. Their family lived Schulenberg and then Taiton, Texas where they helped build the town church. The church was named "St. John's" after Johanna who died before the church's completion.