Czech Digital Archives

If you are descended from ancestors from South Bohemia, the Czech Digital Archives will be an amazing resource for you. However, if you are not fluent in Czech, German or Latin and don't enjoy reading very old handwriting, it may also be a source of frustration. So here are some of the kinds of records you will find and a bit of what to look for in each record.


1. Accessing The Archives
Here is a link to the Czech Digital Archives in English. Once you open it, click on the SEARCH tab at the top.

You can type in the name of a town or a family surname to begin your search. You can also narrow your search to a specific time period. Most of the archive is not indexed by name, which means that while a surname search might be a good way to start looking at the archives as a beginner, it will not give you the whole story. In addition, names are commonly misspelled or misinterpreted and women often have a last name modified by -ova. So doing a shorter version of a surname with an * on the end. For instance (Krys* for Krystufek) will yield more results (although it may also get some results that are irrelevant). It is worth trying several different variations to see what comes up.

If you don't know the town or village your family came from, the surname search is a good place to start because it gives you some ideas of possible towns they could be from. With the Kristufek family, I knew initially that they came from the Pisek area. An initial search by surname brought up Kristufek family members in Talin, Smrkovice and Hradiste. Even though I didn't immediately find everything I was looking for, I did find Czech records that corresponded to records I had already gathered in the US allowing me to make an initial connection to the area and then I branched out from there.

2. What Records You Will Find
When you do an initial surname search, the records you will find will be parish records for births, deaths and marriages. Births are indicated in search results with an N, Marriages with an O and Deaths with a Z.

When you search by town name, you will get results with whole books of records as well as (in some cases) Protivin Census Records. The whole books of data are in two categories: Records Books and Index Books). It is much faster to go through a Records Index, which are arranged by the first letter of a given surname and arranged chronologically, than it is to slog through individual pages of a parish record book.

For instance, let's say you need to find a birth record for your ancestor and you know their name is Jan Kristufek and you think they were born sometime around 1825. And after your initial surname search you have narrowed down his birth town to Talin. Type Talin into the search box, add in the time constraint of 1820 to 1830 and then look for the Index book. The Mysenec Paris Index for BMD 1784-1881 is what you will find. Look for the Letter K section and then start looking in about 1820 and there on Page 60, you will find a notion for the birth record for Jan Kristufek on March 4, 1824.

The Index just gives bare bones information. If you want more, you have to use the Index key next to the name to find the rest of the record. In this case, you will be looking for page 129 in record book 2. To get there, click the SEARCH tab again in the upper left hand of the screen. You will see a link for Parish Register Mysenec - Book 2 at the top of the page. Remember you are looking for the page number that is written INSIDE the book, not the page in the digital index (they are usually off by 2-3 pages) so look carefully at the record to make sure you are on the right page. In this case, page 129 in the record book is Image 142 in the digital archive, but there is the birth record for Jan Kristufek.

A good rule of thumb with ancestry records is that what you are looking for should be right where you are looking for it.

3. Protivin Census Records
In addition to parish records, which list local marriages, baptisms and burials, some towns were part of the Protivin Estate. As such, they kept annual records of everyone living on their lands. This is an incredible year to year resource and a great cross reference to the other information you find. After 1774, the Protivin Estate records include addresses as well, which make cross reference searches even easier. When you search on a town name, if there are Protivin Estate records, they will come up in the results as Siegniorial Records - Velkostatek Protivin.

Some but not all years include a page number index at the front. If you start with a year that doesn't have an index, try looking at other years. For the most part, the record keepers were fairly consistent from year to year with the order they listed the towns in. So an index from one year will likely give you a general idea of where to find that same town in a different Census Record that doesn't have an index.This takes a little finesse but with some practice you can find what you are looking for.

4. Reading The Records
I admit that I am not an expert AT ALL in reading these old texts. However, there are certain words and phrases to look for. I recommend familiarizing yourself with the list of Czech Months, since that will come in handy a lot. FamilySearch.org has a very handy Czech Genealogy Word List that I also highly recommend.

I have found that marriage records tend to yield the most useful information because they tend to have lots of information about the families of both the bride and the groom.

So here is a marriage record for Matej Krystufek and his bride Anna Kolar. You will notice the month of their marriage is Leden (January). The groom lives at Talin 18, the bride at Smrkovice 22. Following a marriage, they are likely to live at one of these addresses, so in looking for other children they may have, knowing these addresses is useful.

The groom section of this marriage record says:

Matej Krystufek nadenik (day laborer) and vojencky (miliary) is syn (son of) Matej krystufek chalupnik (peasant farmer) of Talin 18 and matky (his mother) is Lidmily (Lidmila) narozene (born/maiden name) Krejci of Chvaletice. 

That isn't all the words but it gives you a sense of who they are and where they are from with the words you may recognize. The most common words you will see in Czech that you will need to know are the various months of the year, syn = son of, matky = mother, dcera =duaghter of, narozene (born, indicates maiden name).