Articles
Czech parish registers and how to search them
We write about what we go through every day: parish books, the people in them and how to get to them. Every sample is a real record, and every article says whether a historian has checked it yet.
List of articles
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Registers · · Awaiting review by a historian
Kurrent and Schwabacher: how to start reading old handwriting in parish registers
Why names look different from the text around them, which letter is e and which is n, and how to read your first record after a few evenings.
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Registers · · Awaiting review by a historian
Latin and German in parish registers: the words and abbreviations you need
The words that return in every baptism, marriage and burial, why 7bris is September and not July, and what Fraisen means in the illness column.
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Sources · · Awaiting review by a historian
House numbers, farmsteads and land registers: how to trace your ancestors' farm
House numbers since 1770, a map with every building and a land register with the price, the instalments and the retirement deal. From a parish record to the history of a house.
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Sources · · Awaiting review by a historian
Where to look when the parish register is not enough: censuses, soldiers, surveys and cadastres
Censuses, military records and surveys from the 17th century. What they tell you about an ancestor, where to find them and how to get out of the most common dead ends.
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Registers ·
What is a parish register, and why most of them start around 1650
Three books kept by the parish priest. Why the oldest records are in Czech with no house numbers, and how to look even further back.
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How to ·
How to find your Czech ancestors in parish registers online, step by step
Nine steps from the drawer with family papers to the archive. Which archives have registers online, how to find the right book and how one record leads to the next.
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History ·
The year 1784: why we can find almost every ancestor from then on
One family, two records two years apart: a Latin sentence and a German table. What the decree of February 1784 ordered and what it means for your family tree.
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More articles are on the way: what the occupations and social ranks in the records mean, a child born out of wedlock in the register, and registers online by region. Write to us about what you would like to read.
Start with one ancestor
A name, a year and a village. We send you the record from the parish register for free, usually the same day, within a week at the latest.
- We search parish registers from Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia.
- An ancestor born in 1920 or earlier.