Person:Joannes Thiele (2)

Bohemia

www.actapublica.eu register @www.genteam.at for free first

Renner = 548747 Prenner Anna Maria m 1794 06Laimgrube (St. Josef ob der) Folio 60 #52795 Wien (austria)

Postupice = Popovice Bohem Popovice or Popowitz Records start 1784 Parish Jicin 1623/1635/1635

(Research):Roots & Branches: Court records fill gaps in Saxony By JAMES M. BEIDLER Updated: 01/02/2011 08:33:52 PM EST

Church records in both America and Germany are one of my favorite genealogical record groups.

The baptisms, marriages and burials have a "family feel" to them - often showing relatives as baptismal sponsors, places of residence for marriage partners and previously unknown birth dates and spouse's names gleaned from the "age checks" recounted at the time of death.

In Germany, especially, where few regions kept any civil equivalents of these vital records until the 1870s, church records are the "go-to" resource for genealogists seeking to document family ties.

And helping this type of research along is the fact that Teutonic thoroughness led the religious authorities in most German states to copy over the books and send these duplicates to an archive long before the destruction of the wars of the 20th century, meaning that many church books are intact back to the Thirty Years War in the first half of the 1600s.

Finally, the icing on the cake is that a large percentage of the German church books have been microfilmed by the Mormon FamilySearch folks, giving access to these records without at trip across the water.

Then there's Saxony.

This southeastern German area north of the Czech Republic's Bohemia had a divided history - think names of states such as Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, the Electorate of Saxony and Saxony-Weimar (or if you are using the German names, substitute "Sachsen" for "Saxony"). Adding to the complications is that Saxony has a minority Advertisement EarthShare group of ethnic Slavs known as the "Sorbs" or "Wends." But the real complication, genealogically speaking, comes from the fact that Allied bombing of Dresden in World War II eliminated the area's archived church records, and local books are spotty.

To the rescue come Saxon court records.

These registers, especially those dealing with the purchase or inheritance of leases for land (as a feudal state until the mid-1800s, all land belonged to the lord, though he was usually content to collect a "transfer fee" and add his blessings to the land transactions made in the courts), help fill in the gaps created by the lack of church records.

Often, the inheritances of these leases would list all the names of the children of the leaseholder.

Typically, the youngest son of a family inherited the lease, with the father having helped older sons obtain their own land and made cash payments to daughters.

Fortunately, court records for many areas go back to the late 1500s, and a large percentage of them have been microfilmed by FamilySearch, and therefore are available at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah, as well as through the Family History Center system.

For more information, see the Mormon website at www.familysearch.org.

Beidler is a freelance writer and lecturer on genealogy whose column appears Mondays in the Lebanon Daily News. Contact him either at Box 270, Lebanon, PA 17042 or by e-mail to [email protected]