Discovery.

View Larger Map

In the process of a random search of a Chicago Sanitation report from January 2, 1895 I found the following:

The context is the purchase of a right of way for the expansion of the Illinois Sanitary Drainage and Ship Canal. By the late 1880's about 1% of Chicago's population was a victim of the city's success (read: typhoid, cholera, etc). The remarkable combination of effluent from the Union Stockyards and the less exotic (but equally nasty) civilian contributions to the sluggish Chicago River  made downtown a smelly place. In addition, the north-flowing Chicago River emptied into Lake Michigan a little too close to the city's drinking water uptake for comfort. The genius solution was to modernize the fifty-year old Illinois Ship Canal by dredging and adding locks that deepened the channel and reversed the flow of the river. This met with some objections from proposed downstream communities as far away as St Louis that didn't want to share Chicago's sewage. Anyone familiar with Chicago will not be surprised that they were ignored and the plan was rammed through the state government over all objections and construction was hurried to complete the canal just ahead of injunctions intended to stop its opening.
But back to Charles Jindrich. The old canal was still active in the 1890s, if at a fraction of the tonnage handled in the pre-railroad days, and land along its banks was valuable. It struck me today that because squatters appeared along every navigable waterway in the late 19th century, records of the expansion of the Chicago River Memorial Poop and Sloop Canal (I made that name up. It's a joke) was a natural place to find official mentions of squatters.
So imagine my interest when Charles Jindrich pops up as a squatter on the canal in the area near where Interstate 55 crosses Western Avenue (Northeast quarter of Section 36, Township 39N, Range 13E). My probable relative profited pretty well too as a result of his property crimes. In 1892 the median family income in Chicago was about $475, so ol' Chuck got the modern equivalent of a $20,000 bribe to not contest Chicago's condemnation of a property he didn't own.
Nice.