In an older article we described what farm and land register books are in detail and what data we can find there about our ancestors. For those of you who are about to dive into the secrets of property records, here is a short overview of where to look for them.
Look for newer books at Land Registry Office
If you are after newer records, you will have to go to the relevant Land Registry Office or ask for the records in a letter of application. Land register books from year 1871 to year 1950, sometimes even 1964, are usually kept in the Offices. Searching in these records is protected by Act on Archiving, which means that the books are not available for public and you can search in them only with a relevant authorization. You can find more information about it here and here.
Let’s hit the archives!
Older farm and land register books are kept in regional archives. The books were usually kept by individual manors or dominions, so you have to find out what manor the town your ancestors lived in belonged to.
You can’t avoid visiting a regional archive to look into most of the farm and land register books, however, farm register books have been being digitalized and part of them is available online today.
Where can you look for them?
- Provincial Archive in Opava has made the greatest progress when it comes to digitalizing the sources.
- A part of property records is digitalized in State Regional Archive in Pilsen.
- State Regional Archive in Trebon has also been digitalizing and slowly adding books of individual manors into their online research site.
- State Regional Archives in Prague had also begun with digitalization of land register books.
- More books can be found on the FamilySearch.
It won’t take long for other archives to be digitalized. We will inform you about newly digitalized sources on our Facebook page and we will also update this article.