Can one search for specific surnames on the Portafontium site?

Question

There is a decent tutorial on how to use the Portafontium.eu site of Czech records at http://czechgenealogy.nase-koreny.cz/2014/03/portafontium-website-guide.html, but I can't see how to search for a surname, so I suspect that is not possible. Can anyone offer any tips on how to search? In the tutorial they don't say what should go in the Text box, so I'm not sure what purpose that box serves. It would also help if I knew Czech or German!

Answer 1

I have only recently begun using the portafontium site and I have not looked at the tutorial. In general, I don't think you can search for surnames, though I did some experimenting and there are data cards for some more recently living people that will turn up in a search.   My  impression is that the main thing you need to use the site effectively is to know the village that your ancestor came from.  If you know the village, you can type the name into the "Misto" box and hit the magnifying glass icon.  It will bring up all of the books that have entries for that village. You can decide based on what time frame you are looking for which books to look at.  Really a wonderful resource, but you need a starting point !

Comments

Thanks for your response.  That was my feeling as well. Unfortunately, I'm not sure what village my ancestors would have been in when they died. They were born in Roßbach bei Asch, but married in Schönbach, and possibly did not remain in Schönbach until death, as I can't find either one of them in the records for either village. I am also finding that sometimes the records are not in order. Like 1849 coming after 1906, so it would mean going through each page of a 400 page volume.

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Without knowing exactly who you are looking for, but picking out some names of profiles that you added, I did some searching and came across the marriage record for Prell-135 and Rohrman-29, November 10, 1861, at Schonbach, on scan-33 of As-evangelicka-47.   https://www.portafontium.eu/iipimage/30060105/as-evangelicka-47_3330-o?x=47&y=-5&w=682&h=370 

Is this of any help?

Edited to add:   Sorry, I just noticed that you were really looking for death records. 

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Oh my goodness, that is the entry I have been searching for, as well as looking for their death records!  I don't have a location for their deaths, but I would assume, probably still in Schönbach.  Supposedly both died in 1914. Anna on Christmas Day, but no day was found for Wilhelm's death.  You are amazing!

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I found the birth records of all my paternal grandfather's siblings in that same book!  Thank you so much.  I can't read anything beyond his father's name, but.... I am so glad to have them.  Still no death records though.  Even though some of these books say they go to 1915, they end earlier than that.  Some that are supposed to have death records don't seem to have them, or they are so jumbled up it would take me quite awhile to search through them.

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Thank you.  I'm glad to be of help. I enjoy searching for these sorts of things.

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Having seen the marriage record of my ancestors, do you know what the sloping line over the n in Rohrman means?  We have always spelled it Rohrmann.  Does that sloping line mean nn?

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I don't know for sure, but I think it's a good guess that the dash above the n means "nn".  If you look at other names on the same page, the dash also appears above the "n" in "Hofman" and above the "m" in "Grim", both of which are names frequently spelled with double consonants at the end.