Twenty‑eight‑year‑old widow Leopoldina married her second husband, Bogomir Pečar, on 18 November 1929—only half a year after the death of her first husband, Ivan Scherak. At the wedding she wore an elegant suit and a fashionable hat. The groom, Bogomir, appears well‑dressed in the wedding photograph and in all photographs up to 1935.
The likely explanation for Leopoldina’s quick remarriage lies in the financial situation of an unemployed widow with two small children. Their circumstances were certainly not favourable, even though they had relatively well‑off relatives with a butcher’s shop and inn in Kamnica. Blacksmith Bogomir Pečar owned property directly opposite the Scherak inn and had inherited a solid estate from his father, the former mayor of Kamnica. Ivan and Bogomir were contemporaries, and their families knew each other well. It is therefore possible that the marriage was arranged to some extent, and that Leopoldina had little say in the matter.
Court files in the Maribor archives reveal many additional secrets about the Pečar family—about Bogomir’s father and about his two sons, who had lost their mother as children. What cannot be determined is why Bogomir, tall, handsome, sociable, and a landowner, had not married earlier, nor why he and Leopoldina had no children together. Life for young adults a century ago was far more eventful than I had imagined when looking at old photographs as a child.
