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.
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 type of search you want to use.
The options are:
- village name
- parish name
- signature and page of the book
- converter of old links
We are going to choose the first option. You can put village name in
Czech or germanized version, but there may be more versions than the
archives included, so the Czech name is better.
For finding out what village it is, you may use a gazeteer on genteam.at or google.com (I recommend using whatever name you read plus the word obec plus the "word" .cz). Often villages have their German name on their website or it is on Wikipedia. Be aware that parish books for certain villages may be partially in neighbouring archives - SOA Třeboň, SOA Zámrsk and ZA Opava.
I
decided to use a village of my ancestors as an example. As you can see,
if I put in only a part of the name, it already offers me options (and a
German name and a district). You can choose from the list or write down
a whole name and press enter.
The button "Vyhledat" is a bit redundant, because choosing from their list of suggested villages by clicking already gives you desired results.
You'll get a list of parish books available for the village. You can see columns, they are:
- Number (signature) of the book
- Parish and it's specification (catholic, protestant etc.)
- Births and time frame
- Marriages and time frame
- Deaths and time frame
- How many village are in the book
- How many images has the book
- "Zobrazit" - Show
A
time frame in smaller letters means that there is also an index in the book.
There may be also only index in the book and not the actual records - in that case the line of bigger letters is empty.
When you click on the "Zobrazit" button it will show you the first page of the book. Now you can start to go through the pages.
Options on top say:
- Back to the search
- Digitized images
- Details of the book
- Parts of the book
It's very unfortunate that there is not directly visible a time frame or list of villages, but it's under the Details option.
Icons above the page are very intuitive:
- Zoom in
- Zoom out
- Home
- Fulscreen
- Turn left
- Turn right
- Previous page
- Following page