Kahles and Quint Home Towns

“Where did we come from?” is probably the most asked question about family history. So, here’s a map showing where Franz Kahles and Anna Quint were born.

Franz Kahles came from a village in the northeast corner of present day Serbia called Nakovo. When he lived there, many people still called it Seles or Sellesch as it been known for centuries during the Middle Ages. While the village name changed once, the countries and kingdoms to which it belonged changed more often as did the ethnicities of its inhabitants. Ethnic Serbs lived there when it belonged to the Ottoman Empire during the 16^th and 17^th centuries but by the first half of the 18th century, the village no longer existed and the area was uninhabited.

Becoming part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Sellesch was resettled by Greek traders, the Nako brothers (hence the current name) in the late 1700s. The brothers built houses for their ethnic Hungarian labor force. German families then settled in the village in 1790 as the Hungarians departed due the harsh conditions.

After World War I, the village became part of the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, the future Yugoslavia. During World War II it became a German occupied region. Most of the German population fled the village late in the war and those who didn’t were sent to prison camps. After the war, Serb families from Bosnia came to populate the village. Yugoslavia then broke up into its six republics due to political upheavals and conflicts during the early 1990s. Thus, the village of Nakovo is now part of Serbia.

Anna Quint was born in the village of Bocar (In German: Botschar, Butch’-are) about 12.5 miles from Kikinda. There doesn’t seem to be a lot written about its history.

The maps below will help you pinpoint these villages.

Here are photos of Nakovo and Bocar. I will update this post with an explanation of how ethnic Germans came to populate this area of the world, and why we’re called “Donauschwaben” (Doe’-now shwab’-en) in German or Danube Swabians (Sway’-biens) in English.