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.
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