Updated guide to the Acta Publica website

 

Parish books from the southern Moravia and Vysocina region are being published on the Acta Publica website. This website is administered by the Moravian Land Archives in Brno and is currently available in Czech, German and only partially in English, so I have decided to prepare a guide to it.

Traps of old spelling: Voiced and unvoiced consonants

Parish books stored in the municipal offices (Zámrsk archive)

I often stumble upon a question where to find parish books which are not yet in the archives. I wrote a guide how to find in which municipal office the parish books are stored, but there are other ways how to find out. 

Zámrsk archive offers information about parish books stored in the municipal office - you can find it on their website. There is a list available which covers all the parish books till 1949 which are still stored in the municipal offices in the former Easter Bohemian region.

Oh no, that parish book is still in Municipal Office! (updated August 2020)

How well I know that situation. I need a record from the end of 19th or beginning of 20th century which should be in the archives - but it's still in the parish book which is stored in local municipal office. It's not so bad if the municipal office is near, but if I would have to travel 150 miles to get one parish record, I have to think about it twice. And this is still quite easy for me as I'm living in the Czech Republic. So - what to do in such cases?

Card indexes (Opava archives)

Opava archives (which cover central and northern Moravia and Silesia) contain quite much information. Such as... Tons of different archival sources, not only parish books or census records, but much more. One of those sources are card indexes - or registration cards of the people who lived or moved in the town. You can find similar resource in the Prague municipal archive - Prague conscriptions.

What does 2nd or 3rd degree of relationship mean?

When you are researching your family history, one of the thing you can notice in the marriage notes are dispensations (permissions) to marry because of 2nd, 3rd or 4th degree of relationship. Well, we can translate that one quite easily - but what does it in fact mean?

Czech cemeteries - why there are no old gravestones?

There is one request which appears repeatedly in the guide requests I get - can we visit a local cemetery and look for the gravestones of my family? 

Sure we can. We can walk around the parish cemetery to which the village/town your ancestors lived in belonged. But if your ancestors immigrated to the U.S. hundred and more years ago, we most probably won't find them. Why?