Guide to the ActaPublica.eu website

Parish books from southern Moravia, Vysocina region (Moravian Land Archives in Brno), central Bohemia (State Regional Archives in Prague) and western Bohemia (State Regional archives in Pilsen) are being published on ActaPublica.eu website. This website is administered by the Moravian Land Archives and is currently available in Czech and German. As it is not available in English, I have decided to prepare a guide to it.

 

This is the main page. You can sign in the ActaPublica website but as it is not anymore mandatory, I've skipped this point. So, Welcome to ActaPublica. 

First of all, you need to choose which archives you are going to search. When you move your mouse over the "Vyhledávání" (Search) button, you'll get a drop-down menu with 4 possibilities - MZA Brno, SOA Plzeň, SOA Praha and Diözesenarchive St. Pölten. The last one is archives in Austria and we are not interested in it, so we will choose one of the first three choices. Which archives is respective to which area? See the post Czech Archives overview.

I've chosen Prague archives. As you can see, I have it chosen also in the drop-down menu under the top menu. If you click the drop-down arrow, you'll again see the choices:

The number 10 next to the archives choise means, how many parish books will be shown by page. In fact, it doesn't work and it usually shows 20 pages directly.

You have a name of the village where your ancestors should have been born. Start to type the village name. Don't press enter, just wait until drop-down menu with village names appears. Four letters should be enough for the menu to appear as you can see in an example above.

When you choose the village name, it will appear in the box together with the information about district (village Neveklov, district Benešov). Then press enter or push "Hledat" (Search) button. 

You'll get a list of registries available for the village. If there is a magnifier (in red circle) in the last column, the parish book is available online. If the magnifier is not present, you'll have to wait before the archives scans the registry and put it online. 

When you click on the magnifier you'll get to the first page of the scanned book. It usually is a page showing which registry it is. Now you can start to go through the registry.

This is how the scanned registry book looks like. Going through the scanned parish book is easy: 

To see the villages which are covered by the parish book, just click on the number next to Obce (villages).

Orientation in the registry is not so easy, because there are several ways how the registry could have been written. This topic will be definitely covered by one of the future posts together with some tips, how-tos and so on.