Written by Kate Challis and Lukáš Svoboda who blogs here.Your Czech ancestors almost certainly had some kind of contact with the village rychtář. Who was he, and what exactly did he do? Czech: fojt or šoltysGerman: Richter, Vogt, Schultheiss Latin: judex, scultetus, advocatusThere is no simple equivalent translation into English, therefore it is often translated as…
Category: Czech Occupations
Workday Wednesday: Pasekář, Farmer
This is one of those untranslatable words that means a specific kind of farmer in Czech. You cannot simply translate it to, “a farmer on a clearing” without losing the nuanced, rich meaning of this word. When my husband and I went to Trojanovice, we were told point blank, “this is a paseka.” Well, actually,…
kominík : chimney sweep
Master chimney sweep and his apprentice boy in Italy, from Wikipedia. My colleagues and I transcribed a parish record for an Italian chimney sweep in Choceň which I thought was fun an interesting. I had not considered Italian chimney sweeps in 1740’s Bohemia as a possibility. But apparently Italian chimney sweeps in Bohemia were not…
Interesting Data Mining from old Czech Records
I read a really interesting post over at Lukáš Svoboda’s blog the other day that really helped me to think about my Czech ancestors in a different way. Using various land records, he made a list of all of the residents of the town of Zlonice (okres Kladno) and their professions. What he found was…
die hausbücher der nürnberger zwölfbrüderstiftungen
Ever wondered what your ancestors looked like? If they were a compass needle filer, they could have looked like: I found a really interesting, really old dictionary of occupations from 1400-1500’s Germany. It’s called “die hausbücher der nürnberger zwölfbrüderstiftungen”. The best part? These are portraits of real people. How cool would it be if your…