Czech Out Your Ancestors
Menu
  • About
  • Contact
  • Resources
  • DNA
  • Czech Book Club
Menu

“Did Vlčovice records really begin in 1720?” OR Using finding aids on Vademecum.cz to undertand Czech Jurisdictions

Posted on 21 March 2014 by Kate Challis

I’ve been struggling with the idea of jurisdictions ins the Czech lands.

Jurisdiction is the official  power to make decisions. The jurisdiction matters in genealogy because most of the documents that are left behind are remnants of various religious or political events. Vital records were recorded both for religious reasons (the Bible illustrates the importance of record keeping in Revelation 20:15, for example) and political reasons, such as for military drafts (Empire level politics), and to make sure that the taxes and duties were performed (Estate level politics).

The land of my ancestors is old. OLD. Very, very old. Most villages in my corner of Moravia can claim things like, “the first known record of this village is in 1250 AD, when so-and-so conquered such-and-such neighboring village and built a fort directly outside of it, naming it after such-and-such place/event/person/thing.”

 Here’s the Czech wikipedia article on Vlčovice. It says that the first written mention of Vlčovice dates from 1437 (under the name “Velicovice”).

Okay, so…why do the earliest available parish records for Vlčovice begin *only* in 1720? And why don’t land records appear to begin until 1762 – for almost any village on the Hukvaldy estate?

As an American genealogist, it’s actually pretty comical. Pre-1720 vital records? Uh…yeah, I don’t think so. Yes, there are reliable records in the 18th Century United States – or Colonies – or whatever it happened to be called during the year of interest. That’s just the main thing: from my perspective, jurisdictions change a lot.

So, I had been approaching this problem with the idea that, “Well, if I can’t find pre-1720 records, but the village is clearly as old as 1437, and Catholics were probably keeping records in the 1650’s (because other towns do have vital records that go back that far, and even into the late 1500’s), then maybe I have the jurisdiction wrong.”

Maybe the village wasn’t called, “Vlčovice.” Maybe the Vlčovice records were stored with the Hukvaldy Estate records. Maybe they are located in a completely different archive.

One thing that occurs extremely frequently in Czech history is village name changes. Depending on who has “official” jurisdiction over the land, German, Czech, or Russian names for villages may be used. And guess what; some of them are totally not similar in any way at all. But that is fodder for a different blog post.

I was puzzled, because I understand that the way vademecum.archives.cz works is to organize village records by the modern Czech spelling. This greatly facilitates searches, because a researcher may not know that the name of the village in the early 1800’s was actually Kunzendorf, as opposed to Kunčice. So, apparently the archivists in the Regional Archives of Opava were thorough when they organized these records; I would assume that if there were any mention of Vlčovice under a different name, it would still get the label of “Vlčovice” on the record. But…so…where were the other records?

I searched for “Huk” and really I could not find anything that I knew included records other than those for the village Hukvaldy. I felt like I was going around in circles. It’s hard to find information about the Hukvaldy estate online in English.

So I started to search for information in Czech.

“Velkostatek Hukvaldy” is Czech for “Hukvaldy Estate.” I happened to have one of the land record pages open. It was then that I noticed there, at the bottom of the page, in a list of, “Related Records” the words, “Velkostatek Hukvaldy.”

I clicked it.

I found a link on the next page that said, “Finding aid’s intro.”

I clicked it.

And here we have 23 pages of detailed information about the Hukvaldy Estate holdings in the ZAO (regional archives of Opava)!! This is exactly what I had been looking for!!

At the end? A bibliography of books written about this place during this time. I don’t know how I will find some of these books; they had better be digitally OCR’d or at least copy-and-pastable so that I can plug them into google translate, otherwise, even if I find them, they will be basically useless.

Which is exactly what I did to this document, and quickly learned that there was a huge fire in the Hukvaldy castle in 1762, which destroyed many records. That some did survive, but not very many.

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Bummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmer. Almost 100% of my ancestors lived on this estate.

But hey, it answered my questions! And now I know how to use these great finding aids! And hopefully, so do you!

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Search

Categories

Archives

  • March 2025
  • July 2021
  • January 2021
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • October 2019
  • August 2019
  • March 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • September 2015
  • July 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
©2025 Czech Out Your Ancestors | WordPress Theme by SuperbThemes