Based on a provision made during the Council of Trent (1545 – 1563), the Catholic church started to maintain not only registers of births, marriages, deaths, and confirmations but also
...Church records
In addition to maintaining the vital registers, priests were required to collect a variety of other records relating to the religious life of their congregants. Parish census books and documents pertaining to the observance of sacraments were an administrative necessity. In older times, parish offices were the only authority that could give exact information about the population within their parish districts.
Archival files from the parish offices, although usually housed in public archives, are still property of the church and it's sometimes necessary to ask for permision to view these sources. It is very important to discuss this long before your visit to the archive.
Books of banns
The announcement of wedding banns were required before a couple could be married. For this purpose, the promulgation books (liber promulgationum sponsorum, liber publicationum, liber
...Nuptial protocols
Before a wedding, the betrothed pair and their witnesses were interviewed and, during this talk, a protocol about the examination of sponsors (examinis antematrimonialis
...Books of confirmees
The sacrament of confirmation (acceptence of the Holy Ghost) was conferred upon adolescents to mark their growth in maturity in their Christian life. Confirmation was administered by
...Confessional lists
Before the start of the Thirty Years' War in 1618, only about 15 % of Bohemians and a third of Moravians were Catholic. When Protestantism was outlawed in the Renewed Land Ordinance issued
...Birth, marriage & death registers
Birth, marriage, and death records form the basic source for genealogal research. The Catholic church was originally given the responsibility for maintaining these vital records. Following the
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