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?

Guide to the Zámrsk archive website

The regional archive in Zámrsk has probably the most confusing system to access digitized materials of all Czech archives.

Area: In this archive are stored materials for North-East Bohemia and North-West Moravia. More precisely we are talking about areas of today Hradec Králové region (districts: Hradec Králové, Jičín, Náchod, Rychnov nad Kněžnou, Trutnov) and Pardubice region (districts: Chrudim, Pardubice, Svitavy, Ústí nad Orlicí), but as usual, there could be also areas from around borders of both regions (so from SOA Praha, SOA Třeboň, ZA Opava, MZA Brno) and vice versa.

Map of digitized parishes (and therefore of the area covered by Zámrsk materials.)

Structure of Records

Kate Challis is preparing headlines of columns, so I decided to look at their contents and abstract the common patterns that may help you to with basic orientation.

More examples explained in Czech are also on Blanka's site. So there are not mentioned Czech records, but their structure is the same and could by easily abstracted by analogy from the Latin or German ones.

Political districts, court districts, district offices...

All (well, almost) you always wanted to know about districts in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia. Or at least those important bits which could make your research a bit easier. Not much, but at least a bit. The districts as we know them were created in the middle of 19th century, during huge administrative reform initiated by the Emperor František Josef I. Czech lands were divided into several regions and number of domains before this reform. 

Czech School Registers

This blog post was already moved to Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/back-to-basics-112413908

Guide to Ostrava Town Archives - Censuses

As the Ostrava Town Archives website is not available in English, I have prepared a short guide showing how to search for censuses there. Censuses from years 1900 and 1910 are currently available for browsing - no name fulltext, but the censuses are nicely sorted by house numbers - each house number has its own "folder", so you don't have to browse all census sheets to find the proper house number.

Prague conscriptions

Many of those who begin Czech research will find out that their ancestors were from Prague - or at least the family says so. Well, not all people could be from Prague, right? But there are ways how to find out if the people were living in Prague or not - one of those ways are Prague police conscriptions which are available online on National Archives of the Czech Republic website.

New web application of Prague regional archives

It seems every Czech archives decided to have its own web application / registry browser. After Pilsen regional archives created PortaFontium website together with Bavarian archives and Austrian St. Pölten archives was included under Matricula-online system, the last one which was still staying in ActaPublica website together with Brno land archives was Prague regional archives. Well, it's not true anymore.

Military Surveys and Mappings

There is wonderful source of old maps - three military mappings which took place in 18th and 19the century. Whole Hapsburg empire was mapped and Czech maps are available online for those who are interested. And I believe many people are interested in old maps of regions where their ancestors lived. These maps have also on big advantage - the website they are placed on is available in Czech, German and English. I already mentioned them in one of the previous posts, but let's check them in detail.

PortaFontium website guide

As many of you probably already noticed, Pilsen archives moved completely from ActaPublica.eu to PortaFontium.eu website. Website is available in two languages - Czech and German, English is missing and I'm not sure it's planned to be implemented. As many of you don't understand neither Czech nor German, I decided to prepare an illustrated guide through this website.

ActaPublica.eu - Pilsen archives guide

This information is out-of-date. Check new blog post about Pilsen archives system.

I have noticed that some people are having problems accessing Pilsen archival records published on ActaPublica.eu website. The reason is simple - search is totally different from the other two archives on ActaPublica (Brno and Prague). Therefor I created this short guide to Pilsen archives.

Theme for every week: Heart of Europe

Heart of Europe - this is how Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic is often called. The largest town of the Czech Republic is located in the centre of Bohemia, in the Vltava river valley. But how was Prague divided in the past? How do you work with the registration lists which are available online? And are there some parish books already available?

How to search in Czech cadastral register

Czech cadastral register (register of houses and plots) is available online. It's very useful when you want to find out who's owning the house today, what's the plot number of the plot where the house is standing and so on. Unfortunately the website is available only in Czech, so I've decided to prepare a short guide to it.