Moravia: Which estate is the right one?

It's quite easy to find out which town belonged to which estate in Bohemia as I mentioned in the previous post. Is it the same for Moravia? 

Well. There is no such easy to understand and comprehensive book available for Moravia. But there is a book called Historický místopis země moravskoslezské (Historical geography of the Moravian-Silesian Region) published by Ladislav Hosák in 1933.

This book covers whole area of Moravia and Silesia giving the information about all the estates there. It's not as easy to understand as Palacký's book because it contains also history of each town and village (which is great if you know Czech). 

There is again index at the end of the book which points to the page where the town or village is mentioned. When you get to the page, name of the estate is mentioned at the top of the page.

I chose Černíč, a place where some of my ancestors lived. It belonged to the Telč estate (panství telecké) together with a huge number of other towns and villages. Names of those towns are printed in bold font. You can then write down the names and check the proper parish books to find out if your ancestors are mentioned there.

Let's check what's written about the town in the book: Černíč; Bohuněk from Černíč and Volfířov is mentioned in 1350, who sold the Černíč keep to Pešek from Milenovice in 1353; it belonged to Telč  estate since 1366 and to Šternberk estate since 1385.

It's just a brief history of the ownership of the town - it belonged to Telč estate since the Middle Ages till the large administrative reform in the middle of 19th century. It could be interesting to mention in your family history and it's useful if the owners changed a lot.

The copy of this book from 1938 is available in the Libri Nostri Library. You can download it in PDF: http://librinostri.catholica.cz/kniha/194-historicky-mistopis-zeme-moravskoslezske

Why it's important to know to which estate your ancestors belonged? People were allowed to marry "inside" the estate of which they were serfs. And it sometimes happened that the bride was from a place far away as the estate was pretty large and covering more parishes. So it's useful to know which places belonged to the estate in such case to be able to search through all the parishes belonging to one estate.