Getting Started

Before you can begin your search in the archives of the Czech Republic, it's necessary to have, at the very least, the name of your Czech ancestor and the name of the village where they lived prior to emigrating. If your ancestors hailed from Prague or one of the larger cities, an exact address will greatly increase your chances of finding your Czech roots. Any additional data, such as date of birth, will also be very helpful.

If you don't know your ancestor's village of origin, there are a few ways to go about finding that information. The most obvious approach is to contact older relatives to see if they know the name of the village or if they have original documents which indicate the name of the village of origin. Marriage, birth & baptismal certificates will usually provide the needed information. Family bibles, passports, and old letters are other likely sources.

Ship passenger lists often list the village where the people lived prior to embarkation. They're an important resource for locating your ancestor's origins. Leo Baca's Czech Passenger Lists are extremely helpful to Czech genealogists. Mr. Baca's lists are alphabetized and sorted according to port-of-entry. The name & age of each passenger is given along with the name of the ship and the exact date they arrived. In some cases, Mr. Baca's books list the village whence the passengers hailed and/or their ultimate destination within the United States. Knowing the exact date of arrival and the name of the ship on which your ancestor arrived will allow you to quickly and easily locate the original passenger list on microfilm. The passenger list microfilm, as well as Mr. Baca's books, can be found in most of the larger genealogical libraries.

If your ancestor is not listed in Leo Baca's Czech Passenger Lists, you will need to do a lot more leg work to track down your ancestor's passenger records.

The Ellis Island web site is another fantastic resource for finding your ancestors' passenger records. The center's free database contains records for over 22 million passengers arriving in America between 1892 and 1924. High-quality scans of the passenger records can also be downloaded from this site. A high percentage of the records in the Ellis Island database contain major spelling errors -- the vast majority of these appear to be transcriptional errors from when the data was entered into the computer. If the person transcribing the passenger record misspelled your ancestor's name, it can be very difficult to locate the person for whom you're searching. In this case, the Gold Form developed by Stephen Morse, Michael Tobias, Gary Sandler, and Erik Steinmetz can be used to perform a much more focused search. For example, if you know the town whence your ancestors emigrated, you can search on the name of the town and leave the name fields empty. This sort of search would return a list of all people in the Ellis Island database who emigrated from that particular town.

We've put together a list of links to our favorite Czech genealogy sites which, we hope, will aid you in your research.

Startvorbereitungen

Bevor Sie Ihre Familienforschung in den tschechischen Archiven beginnen, müssen Sie mindestens den Namen Ihres tschechischen Ahnes und den Namen des Dorfes, wo er vor seiner Emigration wohnte, wissen. Falls Ihre Ahnen aus Prag oder aus einer der grösseren Städte herkommen, werden die genauen Adressangaben die Aussichten auf Ihre Wurzelnentdeckung erhöhen. Verschiedene zusätzliche Angaben, wie z. B. das Geburtsdatum, sind ebenfalls sehr hilfreich.

Falls Sie das Stammdorf Ihrer Ahnen nicht kennen, gibt es einige Wege um diese Information zu finden. Die einfachste Möglichkeit ist, Ihre ältere Verwandten zu kontaktieren. Diese kennen vielleicht den Dorfnamen oder haben irgendwelche Originaldokumente, auf welchen der Dorfname angegeben ist. Solche für die Genealogiewichtige Informationen werden gewöhnlicherweise auf Trauungs-, Geburts- und Taufscheinen erwähnt. Familienbibeln, Reisepässe und alte Briefe sind ebenfalls vielversprechende Quellen.

 

 

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