Here is Franciszka Corvin-Krasińska, whose diary I just read. It was fascinating. Somebody should make it into a movie. I liked that she did a good job of describing her surroundings, as well as foreshadowing (which is crazy, because she had not yet lived her story!) She also was an admirable, brave woman, and I…
Top Signs You’re a Hardcore Genealogist (who is a native English speaker with a niche interest in Czech research)
Inspired by my friend’s post here, who was inspired by familysearch’s post here… You are excited when you learn that your ancestors came from a small city, rather than a tiny village, because there are more records to look at. 1225 pages in a land register, woohoo! Yesss! You curse the clerk who, though he…
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…
“The Shiner Song”
Every Texas Czech knows the Shiner song, even us “dry” folks. You can read about it here, here, here, here, or here. So when I saw this sign at the restaurant we went to last night, of course, I had to get a photo. See that star? Yeah, that’s right in the heart of Texas “Česko”, very close to where…
Can’t find the record? Use a historic map!
Yesterday a friend sent me a fun jurisdiction problem which I was able to solve quickly, and with her permission I am blogging about it. The main takeaway is that, at least in the Opava Archives, records are categorized under their current place name. This is very important to understand in Czech research where the…
Final “h”
“h” can look very different depending on where it is in a sentence. And obviously, who is the scribe, and when they were writing, where they are writing, what language they are writing in, what kind of day they were having, how drunk they were, and millions of other fascinating unknown/unknowable variables. To transcribe a…
My “Whys” of Czech Family History Research
About six months ago I read a fascinating article in National Genealogical Society Quarterly called “Thinking Philosophically About Genealogy” by Stephen B Hatton. He writes: Th[e] substance and properties view, held by philosophers from about the fourth century BC until the 1780s, tends to focus on how people think and know. This view sometimes reduces…
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…
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…