Marie Pazourek

Tonight I found the record for the death of the maternal grandmother of Anna Bals.  This is Anna Novotna's mother Marie, married to Matej Novotny. She died on the 18 of June, 1865.  The record says she was 45, but we have her birth record of 1823, so I think she was only 42. When we first started looking through these archives, it seemed as though these families were fairly large;  there was a birth almost every two years like clockwork. But as we fill in the dates of the deaths for many of the children, it strikes me that the families were not so large after all.  Many of the children died very young.  And the children, like Jan Smejkal and Anna Novotna, who did survive, did not know their own mothers for very long.  Anna was only 9 when Marie died.

Drazice Registry D Book 15 Image 133.

Note:  There is sort of an "out of the ordinary" entry for Marie that is directly above her death record.  We may have to ask Olga to translate that one for us...

Rosalie Piskac

More bad news from Book D - the death records.  In  1851, the twins Anna and Veronika of Jakub and Rosalie died at 7 and 9 days old. But I also found that Rosalie, Jan Smejkal's mother (Anna Bals' grandmother) died on October 15, 1858 at the age of 35.  That means that Jan was only two years old at the time.  That explains why Jakub Smejkal has a new wife, Anna, in 1859.
http://digi.ceskearchivy.cz/en/3363/103

The record also says that Jakub Smejkal, Rosalie's father, was a "gruntovnik" and I found a site that translates that as "farmstead owner".  The "domkar" we see in many records translates as "crofter" or "cottager". I'm going to link to that site because it has some other translations we may need:

http://kotrla.familytreeguide.com/showsource.php?sourceID=S114&tree=T1&PHPSESSID=5a54c62013194a82d40afb5985a06922

Grandma's brother Frantisek

Wow. I think I found a brother of Grandma's born in Drazice in 1882 to Jan Smejkal and Anna Novotna, but he only lived for 28 days. In the death notice archives, you can actually see what was the cause of death, for instance in 1884 there was an outbreak of smallpox "nestovice".  One of the most common I can't translate though "psotnik" (sp?) It may be about spirits or something.

Photography Studio in Tabor

Dad - you are going to have to write this blog entry!  Good job finding the photograhy studio in Tabor where the Novotny family was photographed.  http://sechtl-vosecek.ucw.cz/en/muzeum.html





And what a incredibly convenient coincidence that the they will be having an exhibition about historic Tabor at the same time we are there! We have had some very good luck so far.

(Is it possible that Grandma Bals has her hand in this?! Maybe she is baking kolaches for friends in high places!!!  )

We should definitely contact them and make an appointment or see when someone will be available to talk to us.  Maybe they have more photographs of the family!

It looks like we may need to stay another week!

Klokot

It's 5 o'clock and I'm taking a break from errands and all that work stuff before I go play a tennis match at 6:00.  I've been talking to Dad about deciphering the names on the Marie Pazourek entry.  He said he can sometimes recognize names, even though he can't read every letter, because many of the people in Crete, Nebraska had the same names.  He also suggested looking at the old maps we found on the Internet; sometimes the towns are called "extinct"in the records. One map in particular is a historic and beautfully drawn map of the Czech Republic that would make a great game board. I was scrolling around on it in the Drazice and Tabor area and found "Klokot"!  That 's the word I was looking for! That's definitely where Matej, Marie's father, lived with his parents before Drazitz, or Drazice.   I suspected the word started with a K, because it looked the same as the first letter in "Katerina".  It will be interesting to see if it is still on the current maps.

Here is a link to the maps: http://www.mapy.cz/#mm=RTtTcPA@x=133292032@y=133406720@z=7
This is the Historika 1836-1852 map.

Grandma's Grandma

It's past midnight, but I just got the Internet connnection to work and I can't seem to stop!  This is more fun than looking at leases at an abstract company!  I just found the 1823 birthdate of Marie Pazourek in the index, who would have been Grandma Bals' grandmother.  Now I take her birthdate and look at the birth record itself to find HER parents' names. All of the clues have come off of the immigration papers that Dad has for Anna Novotna and Jan Smejkal.

Wow. Twenty minutes later (it would have taken Dad only a few minutes) I find the actual birth entry. This priest must have been really old or very arthritic - it's almost impossible to decipher the writing.  If I didn't know the dates, I wouldn't have been able to even recognize the name.  But reading her parents' names is going to be even more difficult.  It's good to know we will have Olga when we get there.

(I think the priest made a mistake and put the mother's name in the father column and vice versa.  Can't wait to tell my co-workers at Element that I found a mistake in an official document from 1823!)

Czech Digital Archives!

Another late-night frolic on the world wide web yielded a super bonus prize!  Who knew that scanned images of the Parish Records for the Tabor District were available on the internet?! Amazing. I sent the link to Dad before I went to sleep last night, after my few attempts at searching for names came up with "nothing found!".  By noon today, Dad called and had located the birth record for his grandfather, Jan Smejkal! And, what's better than finding one relative?  Finding two relatives! Jan Smejkal was a twin!  I'll post a link to the record here soon.

The fact that we can sit here in our living rooms and look at these beautiful scanned books, handwritten in the German Gothic Script, or whatever it is called, on our computers, and see records of these ancestors is astounding. Dad is right when he says Grandma (Smejkal) Bals would think it is a miracle.  But the thing I am the most flabbergasted by today is not the wonder or convenience of the computer age we live in, but by how the heck Dad -- who has just had cataract surgery and is functioning with only one contact lens --  can see the dang computer well enough to not only find his way around the website, but to find, in the blink of that eye, the right search fields to come up with the answer he is looking for! His agility on the computer may have surpassed his abilty to find deals on big ticket items at Sears.

But as his eyes tire tonight, I carry on.  After a lesson on how to search the archives, I've found the birth record indices of 10 children born to Tomas and Katerina Novotny, who lived at Drazice 14.  One of them was Matej Novotny, who was Anna Novotna's father. Anna was married to Jan Smejkal and is Grandma Bals' mother, Dad's grandmother. I also found the indices for other Novotny children born to a Tomas and Katerina, but they lived at other numbered houses in Drazice, so I'm assuming they are not the same Tomas and Katerina.  It seems that there were about five first names in circulation at the time, so it can be rather confusing. I'm to start a spreadsheet with all of the names and dates, and Dad will fill in the family tree.

Translator/Interpreter

Last night, in a late-night web-browsing session, I googled "Tabor" which is one of the places we will be going to look at records and found this blog.

http://kathiebczech.blogspot.com/2009/08/ancestral-villages-kozlany-church.html

In one of the photos, there is a translator identified who is from the Czech Republic and traveled with the party, aiding them in talking with the locals.  Dad mentioned that we would need the same if we have any hope of talking to some of the older people in the villages we will be visiting.  So, I did a search for the translator, and lo and behold if she doesn't have a website advertising her services as a researcher and translator!  But even more amazing is that she appears to live right in the area we will be visiting!!  Dad is going to email her and we will see if we get a response.  Here's a link to her webpage:

http://www.koliskova-familytree.cz/en/index.html

Disclaimer!

This is my first attempt at blogging. I'm not sure I shouldn't just be keeping an old-fashioned penned journal, but we'll see how it goes. The nice thing about this, it seems, is that I can easily paste photos and links to other sites as I go along.

And I can share the experience with all of you.

The Trip

Dad, Augusta and I are really going! We have been batting the idea around for some time now - but kudos to Dad for actually booking the trip to the Czech Republic!  Dad's on a mission to find the ancestors - maybe even some living relatives - but Augusta and I have an agenda all our own -- Finding the perfect kolache!!

Seems like there's a lot to do to get ready - but at least we already have passports!