The year 1784: why we can find almost every ancestor from then on

Franz Říčánek, a half-farmer of Pozořice near Brno, had two daughters named Kateřina in the 1780s. The first was born in February 1784. In April 1786 another daughter was given the same name, which families did when the first child had died; we did not find the burial of the first Kateřina in the book of the dead, though, so that remains a guess. What is certain is that between the two baptisms lie two years and one imperial decree. The records of them look as if they came from different centuries.

1784: a Latin sentence in ruled columns

Baptism, Pozořice, 28 February 1784

This record is no longer entirely of the old type. The priest writes into ruled columns, because columns appear in the registers from the turn of 1770 and 1771, and on the right he has a house number, which villages received in 1770 and 1771. But the language is Latin, the names are Latinised (Franciscus, Sebastianus), and the father's status is biquadrantarius, holder of two quarters of a lán (the old unit of farmland), a half-farmer. The mother's surname is nowhere. Anna is simply Anna.

1786: a German table

Baptism, Pozořice, 4 April 1786

The same family, the same godparents, the same house. But everything else is different. The book is new, started in 1784 for births only. The columns have fixed headings (here still drawn by hand, soon printed) and the priest only fills them in. A column ehelich, born in wedlock, has been added; religion and sex, which the priest had noted with an abbreviation in 1784, now have columns of their own. Latin has gone; the record is in German. Franciscus is Franz and biquadrantarius is Halblähner. And from July 1784 every village of the parish was supposed to have its own section in the book; the Pozořice priest switched to that only a few years later, and in 1786 he still wrote the village vertically next to the house number.

What the decree ordered

The decree of 20 February 1784 is a short text with a long reach. In today's words:

• Three separate books. Births, marriages and deaths each in its own book, and according to a further decree of July 1784 a separate section for each village of the parish.
• Tables. Prescribed columns for each kind of record. For births: date, house number, name, religion, sex, legitimacy, parents, godparents. For marriages: groom and bride with age, status and house, witnesses. For deaths: date, house, name, religion, sex, age and, where a doctor was at hand, the illness.
• House numbers in every record. They were supposed to be recorded from 1770, but only a fixed column made them universal.
• Valid for everyone. Protestants, allowed three years earlier by the Patent of Toleration, were still recorded by the Catholic priest for official purposes; their own registers gained public validity only in 1849. Jewish communities kept their books under the supervision of the priest, and their registers from 1784 on are today, where they survived 1945, in the National Archives in Prague.
• Public trust. Since 1781 the registers had counted as public books, and an extract from them had the weight of an official document. The priest became, although nobody called it that, a state official.

Over the following years came what we take for granted today: from 1790 alphabetical indexes at the end of the book, copies of the books for the consistory, gradually the name of the midwife, later the district and the number of the death report. But the forms of 1784 essentially lasted until the registers were taken over by the state on 1 January 1950.

The first record in a new book

The decree took effect at the beginning of May 1784. In Bořitov near Černá Hora the parish priest Václav Novotný opened a new book of marriages on 4 May, and the first record is a wedding of a kind that would not have fitted into the old book:

Marriage, Bořitov, 4 May 1784, the first record of the new book

The age of the groom and the bride, their status, witnesses with their occupations, and below it a note the priest would hardly have written five years earlier. Eighteen year old Zuzana promised to follow the soldier wherever the regiment sent him. We do not know whether she went. The small cross before the name of the witness František is his signature: the decree wanted the witnesses' signatures, and whoever could not write made a cross. And we know exactly where the bride came from: house number 28.

The house number is the key

It is the house number that makes the registers after 1784 something quite different from before. A house has a number that usually stays for a long time (renumbering was not rare, though, especially in the early 19th century), and that number appears in other books too. In the land register of Bořitov, started in 1770, house no. 28 has its own page: the farmer is Pavel Odehnal, a full farmer, who that year bought the farmstead (in Czech: grunt), until then held only at the will of the lord of the manor, for 116 Rhenish guilders.

Land register of Bořitov, house no. 28, 1770

Pavel Odehnal of the land register is by all appearances the "Paul, Bauer" of the marriage record, the bride's father. Two different books, two different offices, one number. From 1784 on, a family can be followed not only by names, which are spelled differently every time, but by the house. When an Odehnal from number 28 appears in the register, you know it is this family and not the other Odehnals from number 7. And when you find the house number in the census of 1857 or on the map of the stable cadastre (the detailed land survey of the 1820s to 1840s), you know where the house stood.

What it means for your family tree

From 1784 every record has the same skeleton, whether it comes from Pozořice, Plzeň or Opava. Date, house, name, parents, godparents. For marriages the age, which leads to the year of birth, and from the turn of the century often the names of the parents of both bride and groom with their house and village. That is the chain you follow back: from a marriage to the groom's baptism, from the baptism to his parents' marriage, and so on. How it works in practice is in our step by step guide.

Baptism, Horákov, 3 December 1810

The record of 1810 already has the mother's surname, the date of birth next to the date of baptism, and the midwife from Horákov no. 40 added under the line. Twenty-six years after the decree, it is a full birth certificate. That is why, for ancestors born after 1784, we dare to promise that we will find them, provided the book has survived. A table with a house number is simply reliable.

Where even this period has gaps

So that this does not sound like a hymn of praise. The first years after 1784 are often the worst: priests were only trying out the new forms, only some of them recorded the mother's surname, and for children born out of wedlock the father's name could, from 1770, be recorded only if he came forward himself, so for most of them the chain ends. Some books burned; in the border regions some were lost after 1945. Soldiers often married before regimental chaplains, and those registers are kept elsewhere. And the German language and the Kurrent handwriting that spread through the books after the decree are unreadable for most people today. That, after all, is why this website exists.

Even so, 1784 is good news for anyone with Czech ancestors. Before it, the road into the past goes by names, guesses and godparents, as we write in the article on the oldest registers. After it, the road to the present goes by house numbers and tables, invented by an emperor who wanted to know how many soldiers he had.