Randomly, today at lunch in Salt Lake City, we sat down next to this guy at a cafe whose wife’s father, Stephen Taggart, was a significant contributor to Czech history. Later, I also met his wife. They are a lovely senior missionary couple from Idaho serving a mission in the FamilySearch record preservation (or something…
Category: Czech History
1939 Legal Regulations of Jews in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia
VLÁDNÍ NAŘÍZENÍ ZE DNE 4.7.1939 O PRÁVNÍM POSTAVENÍ ŽIDŮ VE VEŘEJNÉM ŽIVOTĚ Here you can find the exact law regulating Jews in 1939 Czechoslovakia. Open it in google chrome, right click, and select “Translate to English.” It is a depressing read, but it will help you understand the situation for Jews in the Czech Lands…
Porodní Bába
Midwifery is an occupation as old as time. As long as people have been having babies, there have been people to help assist with the birth. Traditionally, this would be the midwife. Not only did midwives deliver births, but they also had a legal duty in terms of witnessing births established in Roman and medieval…
Were my ancestors virgins when they were married?
I’m working on a transcription of a Czech marriage contract from 1794. Here is the paragraph: Ve jménu nejsvětěšjí trojice, Amen.Dnes níže psaného dne a roku staly se smlouvy svatební stalé, a v ničemž neporušitedelné, mezi dobře zachovalým mládencem panem Francem Michnou vlastním synem P: France Michny městianína Frankštadseho jakožto ženichem strany jednej, a dobře zachoval[o]u…
Historic Life Expectancy: Trojanovice 1781-1783
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…
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…
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…
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…
It’s not just me whining about access
I recently returned home from my first trip to the Czech Republic with my husband. It was a perfect trip. I would not change anything. Me with my 5th cousin Roman in front of our ancestor’s church in Vratimov If I could sum up the most important thing that I learned from this trip it…