Person Sheet

NameKristina Szakasits
Birthc. 1860s-1870s, Punitz, Burgenland (now Austria)
DeathDate unknown, Punitz, Austria
MotherMaria
Short bioJoseph Lasica recounts: Kristina Szakasits (her last name may have been spelled Szakits) played a key role in our family history: She accompanied her niece, 13-year-old Mary Schepper (my grandmother), to America in 1912, according to Kristina’s great-niece, Mary Schepper Klucsarics. According to both Mary Klucsarics and a niece, Margaret Marakovits Hanzl, Kristina married but had no children. Apparently she returned to Punitz, Austria, after only a short time in the United States.

I wrote to the National Archives for the passenger ship records of Kristina Szakasits’ and Mary Schepper’s immigration to America, but the search came up empty. The National Archives sent me the records of a Kristina Szakasits who traveled to the U.S. on June 14, 1913, from the Havre aboard the S.S. Chicago, arriving at Ellis Island on June 24, 1913. Those records say Kristina and Johann Szakasits were going to stay with Johann’s cousin, Franz Szakasits, in Passaic, NJ. But Kristina Szakasits appears to be the married name of the woman in those records (her husband was laborer Johann Szakasits from Güssing, Hungary), so this was a different woman, it seems (perhaps a cousin of Kristina’s).

Kristina was Joseph Lasica and Kathleen Lasica Schiro’s maternal great great aunt (mother’s mother’s mother’s sister).