Tips & Tricks for Czech Genealogy Research
If you want to look for your Czech ancestors, Internet will probably become your best friend. Lot of materials from Czech archives have already been digitalized. But what to look for and where? This list of links should guide you in your research. #1: Vital Records The most crucial source of information are vital records (mostly church books). You can …
You got as far to the past as archives allowed, you have hundreds of information fragments about your ancestors and you have created a family tree displaying relationships between dozens of relatives in a specialized software, but it still doesn’t fit the bill? Maybe it’s high time you took all the plain old genealogic data and created your family’s unique …
Lives of our ancestors are inseparable from the houses they lived in and the farms they worked on. If you already searched through farm and land register books (see our previous articles here and here), the next logical step is to put the information you found together with a visual of the farm. The best tool to do it with …
In an older article we described what farm and land register books are in detail and what data we can find there about our ancestors. For those of you who are about to dive into the secrets of property records, here is a short overview of where to look for them. Look for newer books at Land Registry Office If …
When reading old vital records, you can find out what your ancestor did for a living and how their occupation or social status changed over the years. An occupation itself reveals a lot about the ancestor’s property regime they lived in. Houseless serfs and journeymen were usually the poor ones, farmers and inn owners were often much more well-off. If …
Census reports can be a valuable source of information for a genealogist. If you know where to look, they can easily give you a much more detailed look into your ancestors’ lives including details about their occupation, everyday speech, literacy, their farm’s equipment and names and dates of birth of their children. Since census reports between years 1857 and 1921 …
Growing population and the size of the land that couldn’t get any bigger made a part of the inhabitants of Czech villages and towns move abroad, in the second half of the 19th century in particular. Some of them went to Prussia, some went south to Austria and quite a few of them went overseas to the USA. People of …
If you started looking for your family’s secrets by yourself, we are sure that the Internet has become your primary source. More and more registers of vital records and other archives have been digitalized and published online, which makes it possible to track your ancestors’ footsteps. Experienced researchers probably know most of the links by heart, but we have made …
Before you set out to look for your family’s secrets in registers of vital records and other archives, don’t forget to prepare all the information you or a genealogist you ask to create your family tree can start with. Go to see your grandparents or other oldest living relatives. Every genealogist knows how fast life goes and many of them …
They say we should study history to learn from our ancestors’ mistakes. Indeed – we can often be surprised by how many parallels and repeating situations can be found in a family tree. After all, we share the same genes with our ancestors, the same character traits. Let’s take a look at what can our family tree and old records …
