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
Sometimes, there are also "pins" that guide you through parts of the book (e.g. for different villages, or for marriages, births, deaths; or they lead to the beginning of the index).
Going through the scanned parish book pages is easy.
Orientation in the registry is not that easy, though, because there are
several ways how the registry could have been written. This topic is
covered by more our posts together with some tips.
Other search options may be also useful:
You may need to see all books of one parish for example for marriages or if you know the parish is right, but the village is not (e.g. from marriage notes in a different parish or if the family moved).
This is very important for protestant books, because the search not always covers all villages in the parish and works only for the main place.
You can also use the inventory for each district (from Documents, see below) to work out what parish you need.
The main difference between search by village and search by parish is that one village might belong to more parishes during time - and you will see all of them using this search option -, whilst one parish might have more villages, but doesn't show where else they might have been.
If you know a signature number of the book (either from the inventory list or from your previous research), it may be quicker to use the third option.
The fourth option - a converter - is very useful in case you already did some research and now you have old types of links.
If we go back to the main menu, there are further options:
"Aktuality"
leads to the list of news, like new digitized books, scheduled system
maintenance that may cause temporary problems or unavailability etc.
"Dokumenty"
navigate you to documents that may be helpful with your research on
this website. Weirdly, if you switch the website to English, it's empty.
In Czech, there is:
- introduction to the parish inventories
- list of villages
- the actual inventory lists of parish books for each district.
The
list of villages doesn't allow text search, but the inventories do (you
need to downoload the file, open it and allow changes, then you can
search using ctrl+f).
"Nápověda" - Help is only in Czech :(
"Kontaktní
formulář" allows you to contact the page administrator - e.g. with
problems, missing pages, illegible scans etc. They are very nice, quick
and helpful, so don't be afraid to inform them if there are TECHNICAL
problems with the website or image. This doesn't serve to provide you a reading of records or help with your research.
