Birth Records from the Czech Republic

So, this is a real treasure. These are the records that my parents were able to photograph from a birth/baptism record book in an archive in the Czech Republic – I don’t believe these records have ever been microfilmed or been made available to the public other than for those who can travel to the Czech Republic and go to the archives in person. So when they found these records, I was ecstatic.

After returning from their trip, having some of the records translated, and sorting through the many papers to piece them together like a puzzle, we learned that the birth record of every child in the book not only provided a birth date and location and the names, residences (often with specific house numbers), and occupations (for males) of the child’s parents, but it also provided that information for the child’s paternal and maternal grandparents too. So, when you find one birth record for an ancestor, you also get information about that ancestor’s parents, and 4 grandparents. And, if the child happened to be born out of wedlock, it seems that they felt a need to include extra information (to make up for the fact that the mother had had the child illegitimately and the name of the child’s father was not often recorded), so they threw in a 4th generation for illegitimate children. The German Catholics sure knew how to keep records!

The other thing we realized is with so many names provided by each birth record, we could potentially connect many of the other residents of the town to the family because they were cousins. Unfortunately, due to time constraints and language limitations, my parents only had enough time to search through the book – taking digital photographs of each record containing a surname that they recognized, and they also didn’t realize until later that there would have also been a separate book for marriage records, and a third book for death records. (So, now it is our goal to somehow get photographs of every page of that birth record book, along with the pages of the marriage and death record books too, and to be able to go through every record to see who was related – someday, hopefully). But it is so exciting to have the records that we do have, and to be able to go through each of those.
First, I’ll give a list of the relatives we’ve found in those Czech records so far, and then I’ll try to show how they are related with some pedigree charts and family group sheets.

(You can click on each chart to zoom in and read it.)

I’ll post the actual photographs and translations of the birth records for these ancestors too, but this post is already pretty long, so I’ll include them in a separate post next.