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?

Card indexes (Opava archives)

Opava archives (which cover central and northern Moravia and Silesia) contain quite much information. Such as... Tons of different archival sources, not only parish books or census records, but much more. One of those sources are card indexes - or registration cards of the people who lived or moved in the town. You can find similar resource in the Prague municipal archive - Prague conscriptions.

What does 2nd or 3rd degree of relationship mean?

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Czech cemeteries - why there are no old gravestones?

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German-speaking inhabitants of the Czech lands

I found an interesting map of the percentage of native German speaking inhabitants in the court districts of the Czech lands before the WWII. It shows the density of the German speaking population in the border area - Czechoslovakia was forced to give up these parts of the country to Germany in the Munich agreement of 1938.

Estates V - When it all ended?

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Immigrants from Žeraviny, Moravia

South-eastern Moravia was left by quite a large number of people heading to the U.S. They were looking for a better life, better living conditions as well as land to own. Some of them succeeded, some of them not that much. Anyway, some of these people were from Žeraviny, small town not far away from Hroznová Lhota or Kněždub (links go to the blog posts about immigration from these two towns).

Žeraviny on map from 3rd Military Survey. Source: Laboratory of geoinformatics.