My friend challenged my assumption that life expectancy rates were pretty similar across Europe in my last post about this subject, so I decided to look into it further. I used a parish register that I had recently been examining to gather some data. This is the 1781-1783 Birth, Marriage, and Death register for the…
Author: Kate Challis
Medial lowercase “s” before a vowel
That is kind of a mouthful for the name of a letter. But it describes the precise phenomenon about which I am compelled to write. Mainly, because I was totally unable to find any other information on this subject elsewhere online. How this came up: I was transcribing a record with my friend and colleague…
Trojanovice 14
If you are interested in Czech history, you should visit the Valašské muzeum v přírodě in Rožnov pod Radhoštěm, in English: the Wallachian Open Air Museum. I feel like I should add some sort of superlative here, but there really are no words that can do justice for what the experience of going there was…
Historic Life Expectancy: What being “old” means
Would I rather be old, or young? To me, the answer is obvious. I would much rather be old, but not old enough to lose my mind. There are so many obvious reasons why being older is better than younger, but mostly it is summed up in one of Stephen Covey’s ideas about maturity, which…
Víra, Naděja, a Láska – Faith, Hope, and Charity
Here are two poems from Josef Al. Svoboda’s 1893 book: Svoboda, Josef Al, Víra, Naděja, a Láska. Modlitební kniha pro vzdělané dívky katolické. [Faith, Hope, and Charity. Prayer Book for the Education of Catholic Girls.] (Královske Vinohrady: A. J. Cellerina a syna, 1893). Věnování. Zde svatá >víra<! Jež jste obtíženi, a jimž tak těžko v klamech světa…
The Habsburg Monarchy c. 1765-1918: From Enlightenment to Eclipse, PART ONE
Here are some ideas from this book I’m reading. I have not finished it yet, so I’ll add more as I do. Okey, Robin. The Habsburg Monarchy c. 1765-1918: From Enlightenment to Eclipse. (New York, N.Y.: Palgrave MacMillan, 2001). In 1782, there wasn’t actually an official collective name for the Austrian/Habsburg Empire/Monarchy…which began way, way…
Our Czechs were NOT all Catholic
Guest Post by Lukáš Svoboda, author of Kulanův rodopisný blogIf you have Czechs among your ancestors, the probability that they were not all Catholics but Protestants is quite high, especially when they were living in Bohemia. Of course we are talking about times before Bílá Hora, that turning point which changed the course of not…
But…my Czechs were Catholic!
I have done a great deal of thinking about my Czech ancestors. I often wish I could just ask them the many questions I have about their lives, not just questions of identity (Veronika Lidiak, can you please tell me who is the father of my illegitimate third great grandmother?), but questions of their personalities,…
Willabald Wrba
Willibald Wrba. Now there’s a name you don’t stumble across every day. I found Willibald because he married Julie Marie Spacek, who was the oldest sister of Albina Spacek (1890-1918). Albina was the first wife of Louis Klecka (1897-1934), who then married Stella Vasicek (1901-1967), who was the second youngest daughter of Joseph John Vasicek…
Robert Kalivoda thinks, “Bilá Hora, to je škoda!”
I would like to try to summarize what I have been learning from this really fantastic book of essays translated into English for the first time, and only very recently available to me via inter-library loan (but apparently almost completely available online!) The book is called Between Lipany and White Mountain: Essays in Late Medieval…