{LosCuellar.com.mx 123} Family History Bonanza in a Castle

Family History Bonanza in a Castle
By Carol Kostakos Petranek

The archive in Zamrsk is housed in a castle originally built as a fortress in the 15th century. Burned by the army of Matthias Corvinus in 1469, it was expanded into a chateau in the first half of the 17th century and is currently used as a government building.

It was 7:45 a.m. on a cool, clear morning last month when we arrived at the archives in Zamrsk, Czech Republic. To my astonishment, cousin David was right – the queue had already begun to form as people waited to enter at 8:00. "If we don't arrive early," David explained previously, "we won't be able to get a seat. There are only 24 chairs in the reading room and they are filled by 8:15." As I learned in two long and exhausting days, family history research is big in the Czech Republic. So big, in fact, that seats at research facilities are coveted and no one leaves until the very last minute at the end of the day.

The road to the archives is unpaved and unmarked. We never could have found it without David!

Every morning people form a line to ensure they have a seat in the reading room.

What would entice us to awaken at 4:30 a.m., drive 45 minutes to pick up David, and then continue driving an additional two hours to the tiny village of Zamrsk? Why family history, of course! We had returned to Prague to attend a family wedding and also to meet David, Gary's third cousin twice removed. A 19-year-old avid genealogist, he had "found" us on the Internet last summer. Over the ensuing months we exchanged many emails, photos and family information. David's free time is spent at archive facilities throughout the Czech Republic, and his meticulous research yielded precious information on hundreds of members of Gary's Petranek line. Now we were hoping to find some ancestors of Gary's grandmother, Marie Mlynarova.

This was the pedigree chart we brought to Zamrsk

At the stroke of 8:00, the front doors opened and we followed the crowd through the castle's central courtyard to the registration office. David rushed to be among the first to enter so as to secure a table where the three of us could work together. After showing identification and signing the register, we walked to the main entrance where we ascended a wide central staircase to the main reading room. It was there that people jockeyed for positions at the library tables where original records can be viewed. By 8:10, all seats were filled. Late arrivals were relegated to the microfilm room in the back.

Caption: Almost every person is engaged in genealogical research. Some arrive to view other government records.

As we entered the reading room, we found David waiting at a table next to large windows—the perfect location to take digital photographs. We filled out forms to obtain birth, death and marriage registers from the late 1700's to mid 1800's for the towns of Zamrsk and Pecin, then planned our strategy:

David and I would read the records and Gary would take photos. Shortly, a librarian deposited several very old and large volumes on our table.

Each District has its own Registry Books which can date back as far as 1600.

As I opened the books, panic set in. The older records were in Latin and Gothic German; the later ones were in Czech. I could read none of them. David, however, could. He quickly scanned the register pages and recorded names and dates as fast as he could write. The silence would be punctuated by David calling out a fact: "Birthdate of Josef Mlynar  is 14 March 1824."
Or, "Mother of Frantiska Jindrova is Anna Urbankova."

David was having great success but I was making no progress. As I strained to read unfamiliar script and to discern what could be family names, I became frustrated. And the more frustrated I became, the less I could read. It was a vicious cycle and time was passing. "Please," I prayed silently, "help me understand these records."

Birth record of Josef Mlynar, Gary's great-great grandfather, is 5th line down. Look for #17 in left column; this is the house number where he was born.

After interrupting David several times, we both realized that I needed help. And so a new process emerged—David read and I recorded. Page after page, hour after hour, name after name. We took a 10 minute break to eat lunch, then returned to the reading room. 

"We will never finish," David said. He was right. There were family names on almost every page of every book, and we had not yet made it to the middle of any of the volumes. With each generation that we went back, there were additional surnames to add to our search. "I've never seen so many family members in one village," David exclaimed. We were finding that almost half the inhabitants of Pecin were Gary's ancestors!

Regrouping, we decided that we had to return the following day with a new strategy. Instead of photographing only the pages with family names, Gary and David would take pictures of every page of the Pecin birth, marriage and death registers for a 75-year period. Pages from the registers of Zamrsk and other villages where ancestors had lived also would be photographed.

With that decision, the stress of thinking that we had to finish in one day subsided. I relaxed a bit and found that I could begin to decipher Czech surnames. Working through the afternoon with no breaks, we stayed until the last possible moment at 5:00. Since we would be returning, we were permitted to leave the books on our table overnight thus saving precious time in the morning. We felt triumphant as we looked at Marie Mlynarova's updated pedigree chart:

The next morning, we repeated our routine:  up at 4:30, to David's by 5:45, and to Zamrsk by 7:45. As we rounded the corner to the castle, however, we were greeted with an unexpected blessing:  David's grandmother, Jaroslova, was there! Wanting to meet us but unable to join us later for dinner, she decided to spend the day helping us at the archives. I was humbled to learn that she, too, was up at dawn and had ridden a train for two hours to come to Zamrsk. With joyful introductions and hugs, the four of us took our places in the reading room. My heart held a silent prayer of gratitude for Jaroslava's unselfish gift of time and talent: in seven hours, she extracted 200 names from the Pecin birth registry.

Gary, Jaroslava, David

Our digital cameras flashed for hours on end. David photographed 965 images and Gary 1,922. When we left Zamrsk, we had almost 3,000 digital photographs and 1,260 extracted records! Additionally, David graciously gave us several hundred digitized images of records from the Petranek line that he had taken last summer. His remarkable dedication to genealogical research has set an example of excellence that to us is unmatched. Over 7,000 names are found on the website that he created.

Now that we're home, the fun begins! Our first step is to sort the 1,260 records into families, which will be made easier thanks to the Czech practice of including house numbers on every record. We decided to enter the extracted data into an Excel spreadsheet, thus enabling us to sort the information in various ways. We are hoping that if we sort by house number and year, we will have success in grouping people into families. We will then search our digital photographs to find and (hopefully!) read each person's record, then enter the information into our RootsMagic database.

Czech birth records are treasures of genealogical data, as each reveals the name of the infant, his parents, and his mother's father's name, thus providing three generations of information. Death records list age of death or the birth year, as well as the parent/spouse and occasionally children or parents. Marriage records also give the parents' names of the bride and groom.

More than half the death records in Pecin are of children under the age of 12—innocent spirits, pure in heart. As we group these babies with their parents and siblings in the weeks to come, we trust that our capacities to read the records and link these families correctly will be enhanced.

We left for Prague hoping to find a few names. We returned with a bonanza of genealogical data—none of which we could have possibly obtained without David and Jaroslava's gifts of charitable service and selfless assistance.
To them, we owe eternal gratitude.

Family history is a journey that takes us to places near and far, and connects us to individuals who share our genes and our dreams

--
Benicio Samuel Sanchez Garcia
http://www.Genealogia.org.mx
http://www.GenealogiaMolecular.com
"Haz tu Arbol Genealogico...El Arbol mas Hermoso de la Creacion"


Por medio de la historia familiar descubrimos el árbol más hermoso de la creación: nuestro árbol genealógico.
Sus numerosas raíces se remontan a la historia y sus ramas se extienden a través de la eternidad.
La historia familiar es la expresión extensiva del amor eterno; nace de la abnegación y provee la oportunidad de asegurarse para siempre una unidad familiar".
(Élder J. Richard Clarke, Liahona julio de 1989, pág.69)


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