Research Comes Alive: Stefurov

Last year Lyle Spatz and I published our third book together, COMEBACK PITCHERS: THE REMARKABLE CAREERS OF HOWARD EHMKE AND JACK QUINN. It was recently awarded a 2022 SABR Baseball Research Award. Jack Quinn pitched Major League baseball until the age of 50, a remarkable sign of fitness, endurance, determination, and love of the game.

Some years ago I took part in a remarkable genealogical project that determined that Jack Quinn (who took the Irish name to avoid discrimination as an Eastern European) was born in the village of Stefurov, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Slovakia) in 1883. The family name was PAJKOS. We had the help of a Slovakian genealogist and were able to find his baptism record, as well as his entry on the manifest of a steamship from Germany with his parents. They left the old country after Johann’s (Jack, or John) three siblings died as infants. They settled in the coal country of NE Pennsylvania.

On my last full day in Slovakia, I took a two-hour train to Stropkov (NE of Kosice), where Martin Pazdic met me, and we headed to Stefurov. The mayor, Jana Riskova, knew we were coming. Every town in SLovakia has a mayor, even Stefurov, population 117. When we walked into her office, her binder had a copy of Jack’s Wikipedia page. We discussed the town’s history, looking old entries in a journal. There was a terrible fire in the town, though we don’t know the date. I learned that the wife of a famous Hungarian, Dessewffy, gave the land in the area to the inhabitants.

I then met the town priest, before walking to the lovely little church (recently restored) with an immense bell above. It overlooks such a peaceful valley. The cemetery surrounds the church. The “empty” field adjacent to the cemetery is likely full of graves that have no markers. Many of the stones are no longer legible (see photo-some were worse that this one.) We found the 1913 grave of Anna Pajkos, who died at age 74. So she was born around 1839 and could have been Jack Quinn’s aunt or great-aunt. She married into a prominent family, who had many fancy tombstones and still has family members living in the town.

As we drove through many villages in NE Slovakia, they all had two churches- a Catholic one and an Eastern Orthodox one. In one village, Strocin (see photo), they were side by side.

It was a special day, after years of research and “getting to know” Jack Quinn, to visit his homeland and village.