After visiting towns and churches that my mothers family frequented for the last 200 years we were ready to take the archives for retrieving detailed records of the lives of my ancestors. This is not an easy task since the Czech Republic underwent so many political changes over the last 100 years.
Where are the records? They were originally recorded in the Roman Catholic parishes. The communists relocated them into civic archives. Then they were centralized into 7 Regional Archives. One of these was in Brno.
With our trusty GPS we had no problem in finding it one morning. We tried to speak to the security grad/reception, who did not speak English or German. A foreign relations person was summoned. It turns out he knew little about what we wanted to do. He, wanting to be helpful, took us to the Deportment of Culture. There we had a meeting with more people drank water and chatted about life in the Czech Republic as others tried to be of assistance. It turns out the archive department dealing with parish records had moved a few months earlier and that it was to be closed tomorrow on Friday. While we chatted the officials arranged for a Dr. (of something) to come in on her day off to open the archive for us to do the research. We were given the address of the new facility and the time of 9:00am was set for our meeting. We thanked all involved and entered the new address into GPS.
The next morning we were keen on doing our work. We arrived at the address given but there was no archive to be seen. It turns out that a spelling error on my part sent us into the wrong part of town. For the next few hours we tried to find the correct address which was close to on of Brno’s major hospital. We arrived at 3pm. Needless to say the people involved in giving us their day of had not been pleased and had gone home. Even with the disappointment the local representative provided us with useful information which will come in useful for or future research activities.
Where are the records? They were originally recorded in the Roman Catholic parishes. The communists relocated them into civic archives. Then they were centralized into 7 Regional Archives. One of these was in Brno.
With our trusty GPS we had no problem in finding it one morning. We tried to speak to the security grad/reception, who did not speak English or German. A foreign relations person was summoned. It turns out he knew little about what we wanted to do. He, wanting to be helpful, took us to the Deportment of Culture. There we had a meeting with more people drank water and chatted about life in the Czech Republic as others tried to be of assistance. It turns out the archive department dealing with parish records had moved a few months earlier and that it was to be closed tomorrow on Friday. While we chatted the officials arranged for a Dr. (of something) to come in on her day off to open the archive for us to do the research. We were given the address of the new facility and the time of 9:00am was set for our meeting. We thanked all involved and entered the new address into GPS.
The next morning we were keen on doing our work. We arrived at the address given but there was no archive to be seen. It turns out that a spelling error on my part sent us into the wrong part of town. For the next few hours we tried to find the correct address which was close to on of Brno’s major hospital. We arrived at 3pm. Needless to say the people involved in giving us their day of had not been pleased and had gone home. Even with the disappointment the local representative provided us with useful information which will come in useful for or future research activities.
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