Czech - Currach

Czech

Jan12

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Beautiful Little Girl

Posted in: Czech, Photo

My cousin Jana in the Czech Republic recently found another cousin from her part of the tree. She recalled that I had emailed some photos to her a few years ago, and that one of them included this “new” cousin’s grandmother as a young woman, so Jana asked if I had a higher resolution scan to send her to share.

It took me awhile to find the photo, as it was squirreled away in a triptych album in one of our boxes. While looking, I realized that I had completely forgotten about two very large envelopes full of old photos from my Czech side of the family, so I guess I’ll be breaking out the scanner and uploading to The Flickr again.

Flickr is a great tool for us all to see and comment on the photos – I’ve learned who many unknown family were via my cousins in Ireland and the Czech Republic going through them and asking around over there.

One photo I found last night really stood out for me – an absolutely beautiful little girl, all dressed up with a necklace and flower. So far, we don’t know who she is, but she is wonderful to look at.
Jan16

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Czech Town Gathering

Posted in: Czech, Photo

We have this photo in our family albums, and my mother believes it is some sort of town gathering in her mother’s home of Předmíř in the Czech Republic.

One copy seems to date it around 1912 – I really like the image, but wish I knew more about it.
Jun13

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Familysearch Tree Missing Characters

Posted in: Czech, Technology

I have been adding the basics of my family tree to the new Familysearch – dig that new fan chart!

Today I was working on one of my Czech lines, which of course contain all sorts of fun and exciting ácčěntéd characters. After I added my great-grandfather Vaclav Vaňáč and started to work on his parents, I looked up and realized there was an issue. Although the name shows properly in the “Vital Information” section of the main page, his name in the profile header mysteriously doesn’t contain the “ň” or the “č” – but still does have the accented “á”. Hmmm.

I tried to send a message to the Familysearch support folks via their help center, but kept getting the error “Unable to create a case in our support system. Please try again later.”

Thus, wrote up this blog post to use when trying again later.
Apr30

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The Čechs (Bohemians) in America

Posted in: Books, Czech

For those who like to research the history and social aspects of their immigrant forebears (or fivebears even), Google Books is a great place to hang around. And they don’t get annoyed when you break out the snacks.

One book I have been reading through is The Čechs (Bohemians) in America, A Study of Their National, Cultural Political, Social, Economic and Religious Life, By Thomas Čapek.

While the style of this circa 1920 writing is a bit dated and the perspective could be argued as slanted in Czech favor, there is quite a bit of dimension to be had on the experiences of Czech immigrants, their reasons for leaving home, and how they fit in after arriving in the United States. Read More | Comments
Mar18

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Using Google Street View With Mapy.cz

Posted in: Czech, Maps, Photo, Technology

A quick update to this post: I am not sure how new this news is, but I just noticed that Mapy.cz now has street view imaging built right into their own interface!

It also appears that they are using their own imaging, as opposed to the Google Maps street view, since there is a “Panorama Beta” watermark at the bottom of the screen. Also, when I compared the two street views of the house of my 2nd great-grandparents in Defurovy Lažany, the current resident had put out the trash in Google’s image and not in Mapy.cz.

I’ll leave this post as is, since the technique can still be useful – there may be locations that are not full imaged in one service and not the other, for example. Happy Hledání!

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Last summer in my blog post Then and Now: Simanek Family Home I described a nice find when I looked up my grandmother’s home in the Czech Republic using Google Street View and then found a matching photo in our family albums.

Aaand, we’re back in The Republic again!

First, thanks to a distant cousin, Pavel Vanac who sends me all sorts of links and information on our shared Vanac lines. He has been looking for all the Vanacs and descendants and is hoping to have a reunion one day in Prague and I really hope I can attend.

For this year he has scaled back the idea to an online reunion – which may be difficult since I have only a tiny bit of the Czech language in my brain. (We normally communicate using Google Translate between us – which has sparked some fun confusion on both sides.) But I am still looking forward to that!

Back to the story here – Pavel sent me a small photo over the weekend with the message: Read More | Comments