In a message dated 6/24/2006 10:18:28 AM Mountain Standard Time, jlmikeska@yahoo.com writes: I've heard comments of Czech researchers that it so hard to find much information prior to the 1500's in, what is now the Cz Rep, because very little was written down Early records were usually manorial records kept by each noble landlord for the places included in his dominion. They include census of a sort, land transactions, tax and robot records, last wills and testaments, marriage contracts, petitions, and court records (legal actions and justice judgements). My researcher has told me which manorial records are available for the various noble families that owned the dominion where my ancestors lived. I found the names of those families in J.G. Sommer's survey of the Pilsen district. >> - estimated 90% of populating could neither read or write and official records were recorded in German, the language most officials knew, Hence, rewords in German.. << In 1880 the Bohemian Conscription Commission reported that there was still a literacy rate of only 60% among the rural peasants and lower classes the recruited most. After that general literacy began to improve. Maria Theresa enacted a law requiring universal education but she did not provide the funds the law called for. Any place that wanted a school had to put up their own building, find a teacher and manage the teacher's pay on their own. They also had to be willing to let their children who often did a lot of work in the fields take time off to go to school. Many of the earliest schools were under the patronage of a parish or a nobleman. Some others may have been supported by a foundation that gave it income from fields, vineyards or other assets donated for the school. The result was that there was not a school in every village and children who wanted an education may have had to walk some distance to the nearest place where there was one. For a long time Czech and German monks and the nobility were among the few literates in Bohemia. Even the tax rolls of 1654 were originally written in Czech, not German, if the report in the Bishoftenetz Heimat book is correct. German became the official language of Bohemia after 1740 when Maria Theresa became Queen. It was after that that the LATIN used for keeping church registers was changed to German. I have found some records as late as 1790 that are still in Latin and other people have reported that they have seen some in Czech dated after 1740. 1800-1868 just about everything was in German except for Hungarian records.. I don't know what happened to church records during the Hussite and Protestant periods in Bohemia -- if they were kept in Czech. Karen