When I first started genealogy, it was all about the names.
There’s a special rush in the beginning—the green-leaf hints, the thrill of watching generations stack neatly into place, the satisfaction of saying, “Look, I found them!”
That stage is what hooks most of us, and rightly so. It’s where the puzzle starts to take shape. But over time, the excitement of adding names turned into a need to understand them—to know not just who they were, but how I know it’s true.
That’s the part of genealogy that really speaks to me: the proof.
I need to see it with my own eyes. I want to know that the person in my tree is the right one, that the dates line up, that the handwriting on the record belongs to the same family I’ve been tracing. For me, it’s not enough for something to “fit.” It has to be factual. But proof doesn’t always come easy—especially when it’s written in three languages, two alphabets, and a handwriting style no one’s taught since the 1800s.
When I began re-checking my Neubauer line, I thought I already had a solid tree. Someone before me had clearly put in hours of work: tidy names, believable dates, the right villages. The problem? Almost no sources. It was a beautifully written story without citations—more “trust me” than proof.
To be fair, I’m sure the researcher who built it had sources. They probably worked from the original parish books in Europe, maybe even corresponded with local archivists or priests. But when their work made its way into Ancestry, those careful details didn’t always translate. The breadcrumbs were gone, and what remained was a record of conclusions, not the path that led there.
Then I stumbled across Porta Fontium—and everything changed.
Porta Fontium hosts digitized parish books from western Bohemia and neighboring Bavaria. The scans reach back to the 1600s—baptisms, marriages, burials—all photographed page by page. These are the same volumes you’d handle with gloves in an archive in Plzeň, except now you can scroll through them with coffee in hand.
It isn’t point-and-click genealogy. You’re turning digital pages, scanning for familiar surnames written in Latin, Czech, or German, often in Kurrent or Kanzlei script that looks like a cross between cursive and hieroglyphics. But that’s part of the charm. Every line feels like a small victory: There’s Georg Neubauer, Häusler in Hornous No. 44… there’s Magdalena Straka, still living in 1849.
Once you adjust your eyes, these records are astonishingly rich.
Women are recorded with their maiden names—usually marked with “née” or “geb.” in German—so you can trace maternal lines just as clearly as paternal ones.
House numbers identify the property, not the street—so one number can trace a family for generations.
Occupations, witnesses, and notations tell the story behind the names.
In one marriage entry, I learned not just who my great-great-grandparents were, but that his father was already deceased, his mother still alive, and that she’d been a Straka before she was a Neubauer. All from one paragraph written 175 years ago.
Learning to read these records has been like learning a new language—and sometimes, three at once. I’ve had to study letterforms, translation quirks, and cultural context just to tell the difference between a family name and a field name. But what I’ve learned along the way is that you don’t have to be fluent—you just have to be curious, patient, and willing to ask for help.
One of the hardest parts of diving into Czech parish records is how quickly you realize you’re not just translating words—you’re translating time. Every page is written in a mix of languages and customs that don’t exist anymore. The priest might record one baptism in Latin, another in Czech, and the next in old German, all in handwriting that looks like decorative art until you realize it’s supposed to be someone’s name.
That’s where AI has been surprisingly helpful. I use it like an assistant who’s fast with atlases, dictionaries, and a deep library of history books. It helps confirm whether a village is close enough to make sense or reminds me that a person born 200 miles away in 1850 probably isn’t the same one showing up in my little parish in Hradec. It can translate snippets of Latin or German, explain an archaic occupation, or show me what Kurrent script is supposed to look like when the letters all blur together after midnight.
Sometimes it even points me toward neighboring parishes I might not have thought to check—helping fill in those gaps where one book ends and another begins. And when I’m not sure why a family might have moved or what the local history looked like at the time, it can instantly pull up the kind of cultural context that turns a record into a story: the border shifts, the harvest patterns, the faith traditions that shaped how people lived and wrote their names.
Even with all that help, the real work is still mine.
AI can suggest, clarify, and speed things up—but it doesn’t know my family. It can’t tell me which Joseph Neubauer belongs to me or why a record “feels” right. That part comes from patience, pattern recognition, and a little intuition built over time.
I like to think of it as teamwork: the old priests preserved the records, I do the detective work, and AI keeps the coffee from going cold while I figure out what century I’m reading.
For me, the best part of finally accessing these records wasn’t just confirming names—it was understanding the people behind them.
Take my great-grandfather, James Neubauer.
For years, I believed he had immigrated to America around 1890, at just eighteen or twenty years old, traveling alone. My earlier research painted a picture of a young man, barely out of his teens, leaving everything familiar behind to start over in a new country.
The only clue I had for the longest time was a 1953 newspaper article from Chicago celebrating the 60th wedding anniversary of Anna (Bilek) and James Dusheck. It mentioned their wedding attendants, including a James Neubauer who was noted as “deceased.” That tiny reference raised more questions than it answered. Anna’s mother, Mary (Neubauer) Bilek, had been born in Bohemia in 1855 and seemed like she could be part of my family, but at the time I didn’t know she had died in Howard County, Iowa—or that my Neubauers had any connection there at all. All I had was this random Chicago link and a familiar surname that didn’t quite fit.
It wasn’t until I returned to Ancestry and began digging through Newspapers.com that the picture started to expand. More Neubauers appeared—siblings I hadn’t known about—along with records placing them in the Cresco, Iowa area. And now, through these newly digitized Czech parish books, I finally know the rest of the story: his mother died in 1886, his father in 1889, and by 1892, all of his surviving siblings had already migrated.
He didn’t abandon his family to chase adventure.
He was alone, and he crossed the ocean to rejoin what remained of them.
That one discovery changed everything. It turned a mysterious young traveler into a son finding his way home.
A word to the wise (and to my future self): label your screenshots immediately.
Rename files—1851_Margaretha_Neubauer_death_Hradec.png is a lot more helpful than Screenshot 2025-10-10 at 9.38.49 PM.png.
Better yet, upload each image to the right person in Ancestry while it’s fresh. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a desktop full of anonymous treasures and a weekend lost to detective work. Ask me how I know.
It’s the least glamorous part of research, but good organization is what turns curiosity into history.
In a way, I’ve come full circle. I started by inheriting a tree that was beautiful but unsourced; now I’m building the sources back in—one screenshot, one translated line, one confirmation at a time.
I’m uploading each record image into Ancestry so future researchers can see where the information came from. Maybe one day, someone else will start where I left off, and instead of wondering how I “knew,” they’ll have the evidence right there to build on.
I’ll share a post soon on how to add sources to Ancestry and keep them tidy. For now, I’m just grateful that the path back to the 1700s can run straight through my laptop screen—and that the need for proof still feels as thrilling as discovery ever did.
If you’ve been nervous about diving into old European records because of the language or handwriting, don’t be. The hardest part isn’t reading every word—it’s recognizing the patterns. Once you learn how the pages are structured, those little words like ‘filius,’ ‘uxor,’ or ‘geb.’ start unlocking stories you didn’t even know were hiding there.