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…
Month: September 2016
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…
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…