Going out with a bang

My father used to like to say that his grandfather blew himself up and that there was so little of him left, "they buried his shirt."

That would have been my great-grandfather, Matej (aka Michael) Knez who was born in 1858 in what is now the Czech Republic. He came to America in 1902, got a job and saved his money so that the next year he could send for his wife and five kids. They settled in Chicago originally, but some of the family went to Wisconsin; some stayed there and some returned to Chicago after a couple years.

My dad said that Michael and family had been living on a farm in or near Phillips, Wisconsin, and that he hated it. One day he was drinking heavily in a local tavern and bragging that the box he had with him was full of some highly dangerous explosives and that he intended to go home and blow up the farmhouse.

The genealogist in me has always wanted to find what truth, if any, there was to this tale, and I've been looking for a death notice or coroner's report or even any proof that the guy ever actually lived in Wisconsin. But I found nothing.

Then one day last month I got a brilliant idea and posted a question to a Facebook group called Wisconsin Genealogy Network.  Shortly thereafter one member of the group supplied me with a short article from a Rhinelander (Wis.) newspaper about the incident, and the next day someone posted an image of an article that appeared in the Phillips newspaper, The Bee, on Decebmer 17, 1914. This is the gist of it, which appeared under the headline, "Suicide by Dynamite:"

"The shattered remains of Mike Knez, a resident of the town of Emery, were found in the woods about a half mile from the home of C. F. Glissendorf, on Saturday last, Dec. 12th.... It is evident from all that can be learned that Mr. Knez took his own life, as on Monday, Dec. 7th, he came to town and purchased five pounds of dynamite and from remarks he made to people in the city that day he had made up his mind to commit suicide.  The deed was done, it is thought, on Wednesday.... It is supposed that he either sat upon or laid down on the dynamite and lighted the fuse."

It's good to know finally that this outrageous story is actually true, but what is more astonishing is that I chased this for 40 years without success, but once I put it out on Facebook, I had an answer within ten minutes.