Issue 2, Vol. 47 (2023 ) - 2023

Czech historians have been only exceptionally interested in one of the world’s most widespread hobbies, family history and genealogy. The growing interest of the public in the past of their own family, generated by the digitization and accessibility of the necessary data, has been however noticed also in the Czech Republic. The decision to organize a panel on the topic of genealogy and family history during the 12th Congress of Czech Historians in Ústí nad Labem was a logical consequence of the current situation. On 20 September 2022, the session entitled Poverty of History?! Genealogy, DNA and Family History took place. Nine presentations were delivered to an unexpectedly large audience, which consisted mostly of academics but also of practicing professionals such as private genealogists and archivists. A full room has convinced us that public genealogy and family history is the topic that deserves our interest.

This study explores the transformation of genealogy in the Czech Republic from 1997 to 2022, with a strong focus on the significance of electronic sources. While traditionally limited to the nobility, genealogy has become widely accessible to the civilian population thanks to the internet and the digitization of records. The availability of online tools and websites has made archival materials and family tree creation convenient for the public. Looking ahead, the integration of genealogy with digital science is expected to continue. It is necessary to emphasize the critical need for education at all levels to ensure responsible research and data sharing, especially in the era of electronic resources.

The author shares her personal, almost a quarter of a century long, experience
with genealogy and its teaching at the universities. As a student, she experienced “the
standard courses” where genealogy was given only a minimal space. She encountered
a very similar situation after becoming a university teacher at another university. After
few years of “standard” teaching, she started to try to change the perception of genealogy
as a kind of “leisure-time discipline”. And finally, during the last five years, she has begun
to turn her ideals into reality in the role of a guarantor of the Bachelor’s degree study
program of Historical Sciences at the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Hradec
Králové. She explains why – from her point of view – genealogy used to be marginalized
as an academic discipline and what the consequences have been.

This study is a reflection on the possibilities for cooperation between the fields of historical demography and genealogy. The first part of the paper summarizes the development of genealogy as a discipline in the Czech context. The paper goes on to recapitulate theoretical and practical examples of the involvement of genealogy in historical-demographic research in western historiography, especially in the North American context. The paper then discusses Czech development from the 1960s to the present. The paper compares the possibilities of both approaches by introducing the creation of a database using the classical application of the method of family reconstitution, discussing its pitfalls and the characteristics of such research in the Czech context. The paper then presents the possibilities of applying genealogical approaches and evaluations the situations in which applying such approaches is most appropriate.

The objective of this study is to analyze the motivation of the lay public in collecting, writing down, or compiling family documents, in particular memoirs, recollections, and family chronicles. We posited the question of whether there are specific subconsciously created templates of writing down memories that delimit and conceptualize the method of their remembering, or whether the resulting texts are purely individualized. One particular level of consideration is the very addressees of the family recollections, who do not just work with the texts as a “family treasure” but who also have an interest in preserving them for the broader public. What are their motivations for making these to a large extent intimate texts public, and in what way can these highly personal and specific recollections be useful to researchers?

The aim of this study is twofold. On the one hand, the article provides an overview of current research in the field of family memory, amateur family history and (genetic) genealogy, emphasizing a few areas that are of interest for professional historians. These include the close links between the stories transmitted in families and family identity, its functioning and family resilience; the potential of family history to reveal alternative versions of the national past; and finally, genetic (DNA) genealogy, which has won the favour of tens of millions of adherents worldwide and which is able to redefine historically traditional social structures such as family or kinship. Investigative genetic genealogy is a fresh and burgeoning field that gives amateur family history new dimensions by including it into the investigative leads of law enforcement authorities. In the second line, the article provides examples of research done in the Czech Republic.