Czech Roots: Finding Your Ancestor's Village

Profile managers: Helmut Jungschaffer [send private message] and Michelle Hartley [send private message]

UAZK Property (Cadastral) Maps

• The UAZK (Ústřední Archiv Zeměměřictví a Katastru = Central Archive of Surveying and Cadastry) web site has many maps. One collection is the cadastral (property definition) maps, which date to the 1840's and show who owned each tract or parcel of land. These can be very valuable for finding your ancestors' location, particularly for those places where the numbering system has changed and you only have the old house number.
• Using the site is a bit difficult, since there is no overall search capability. But if you know the town for which you are looking, you can follow these instructions to locate the map of the town.

Instructions for Finding UAZK cadastral map of a specific town

• Cadastral Maps

1. Click on the "Stabilní katastr" link on that small map.
2. This will (eventually) open a map of the Czech Republic. It has the very long URL archivmapy In the URL, change the "language=cz" to "language=en" and press Enter to go to this revised URL, which will have all the text in English.
3. You can navigate to your town by clicking repeatedly on the magnifying glass cursor, if you know where it is located. (Be prepared for it to be slow loading each anlargement.) Alternately, you can search for the town by name. At the top left, click on the downward-pointing arrowhead in the "Search for" box. Click on the first one "Názyv - Geonames Česká rep ublica". This will open a window to the right, labeled "Geonames". Enter the name of your town in the box (correct diacritical marks ARE required - see a method below for obtaining this via Google Maps) and click Search. This may not show anything for a minute or so, but eventually a box will pop up with your town, which could have several variants. Choose the right one (usually the one with nothing in the "jmeno_n" column) and click on the magnifying glass to the left of the name. This will take you to the town, which will be shown as a blue dot within an outlined area. At this point, you can close the popup window, if you are at the right town.
4. At the right, there is an icon bar. Click on the icon of the letter "i" inside a small box. (If you mouse over the icon, you will see that it is "Select".) Then click the cursor on the blue dot where your town is.
5. This will open a new popup window, which will have one or more towns shown. Click on the "mapa" link to the left of your town's name.
6. This will open a window with several rows of map thumbnails. These are labled skici (sketch - really a complete town plan), přehl (overview), otisky (prints - the individual sections of the overall sketch), and katastr (cadastre - takes you to a zoomable topographic map). The map you really want is the sketch. So click on the "skici" map. But the cadastre map has the (apparently modern) land divisions (which are very like the old ones) overlaid on top of a modern aerial view -- a wonderful tool (click the button at the top for "katastrální mapa + ortofoto").

Instructions for Using Google Maps to find correct diacritical spelling

The search by name in the steps above requires that the town name have the correct diacritical marks. The easiest way to obtain this is via Google Maps.

1. Open a separate window and go to maps.google.com.
2. In the Google Maps search box, type your town name, with the correct spelling but without the diacritical marks. Google will suggest town names, and you can then click on the correct suggested name. This not only gives you the map of your town, but it also enters your town's name -- with the correct diacritical marks -- in the Google Maps search box.
3. Now, use the Windows copy and paste features to copy the name from the Google Maps window and paste it into the search box on the UAZK web page.
4. Use your mouse to highlight the name of your town in the Google Map search box (just the town name). Then hold down the "Ctrl" key and also press the "Insert" key to copy the town name to the Windows clipboard.
5. Now go to the UAZK web page with the map of Bohemia, and in the "Geonames" box, click the cursor, and then while holding down the "Shift" key, press the "Insert" key to paste the name into the search box.
6. Then click the Search button and pick up the instructions above in the place where Google Maps is referenced.