As Lillian observed, the details in these land records can make a line "come alive." But in addition to adding lively details to the pedigree, the land records can be crucial in untangling a line. The researcher I worked with on this line had run into a snag in the churchbooks - two married couples with exactly the names (Jan and Mariana Jenissta) in the same village in the 1700s. My ancestor Jakub's baptism showed he was the son of one of these couples, but it was not clear which. Since the farm he owned in the 1800s could be identified from later records, deeds were followed back and revealed which were the right ancestors. To locate land records for land owned by a serf, you must know what feudal estate they were in. Usually the serfs in a given village were under the same estate, but this is not always true. Over time individual houses and associated fields, together with their serfs, might have been conveyed to another feudal owner, perhaps ending up owned by a feudal estate some distance off. As an example, the royal City of Litomysl purchased the village of Sloupnice from its feudal lord in the mid-1500s. The people in the village remained serfs but now owed their feudal obligations to the city government in the same fashion as they had to the prior feudal lord. But a small handful of houses in Sloupnice, with their associated fields and serfs, had previously been sold and as late as the 1840s, a dozen or so scattered houses in the village were owned by a different feudal estate, the estate of Chocen, seated about 5 miles to the northeast. So land records for those particular farms would be among the estate records for Chocen (now probably in the district archives at Zamrsk) while the rest of the land records for this village are in the City Archives at Litomysl. >>> Lillian Bodker <kidos4@webtv.net> 7/7/2004 5:54:20 PM >>> Kevin, Thanks much for sharing the translation of the deed with us. It is very interesting and its good to know that this kind of information is available. Seems to make the family history "alive". Lillian