In 1977, he found old documents of his grandfather. The documents were proof of purity of origin. It was necessary to have such documents during Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. People had to prove three generations back that they weren’t Jews so as to satisfy the German Reich.
He found them very interesting. An idea of creating his own family tree crossed his mind. Unfortunately, he didn’t have enough free time at that time as he was studying and preparing for his employment. He got back to it in 90s.
At first, we visited Provincial archive of Opava. He scrutinized records of register of births and deaths to find out more about his ancestors. People used kurrent which is a form of Latin alphabet in past. It was used before a transition to humanist miniscule (Contemporary form of Latin). It means that records of register of births and deaths were written in kurrent. It made him to educate himself in this area so that he could read the archival records.
As the time passed, digital technologies and digitalization of registry office records caused that it is not necessary to visit archives in person anymore. Everything is available online. Part of the records of births and deaths are also stored at municipal offices. It was very easy to check them in the past. Unfortunately, when the GDPR was brought in, it was mandatory to prove that you relate to a person you seek a record of in the register of births and deaths. When you come over to a municipal office nowadays, you are only shown one line from the registry book of records. The rest is covered with white sheets of paper. It is in a stark contrast to the fact that everybody knows everything about everybody on the Internet.
I commented on it: “Perhaps, people know more about other people than agents of State Security (StB) knew during the communistic era.” He nodded in agreement.
He attended a training organized by a Genealogy society. He told me there are three types of how your genealogy tree can be worked on. The first type of a family tree is the one where you only records ancestors from your father’s side. The second type is when your family tree begins with a very old ancestor and branches towards contemporary generation (you). The third type is the one in which the family tree starts with you (or the youngest in the family) and goes back to the past. It branches back to the past. The third type is the most common one.
During inspecting your ancestors, you gather very interesting information about your own family. The man in the photo made / built his family tree to the 17th century. There are among the interesting facts about his family: One of his ancestors died during fighting in the 1st World War or that one member of his family committed suicide.
He worked as a primary school teacher for his whole life. He started teaching in 1983 and finished in 2018. He says that one of the main differences between teaching nowadays and in the past is that the amount of information and knowledge fed to pupils has expanded considerably. Pupils were taught less information in the past. Nowadays teachers start to teach specific subjects and knowledge earlier than in the past and in bigger amounts. Pupils are not prepared for it.
While travelling together on train, he was on his way to Moravia to meet up with relatives who he partially discovered while working on his family tree.
