BRANDLs

Yesterday, Larry found this online:

No, this is not the John Brandl who married Frances Janson.  This John lived in St Paul, Minnesota, but look:  he was applying for a passport to go visit the village where he was born , Hagenfurth, Bohemia.  Larry found that John went back to Bohemia several times, and came home with people from there.

But wait!  Can an ethnic German be a 'Bohemian'?  Sure...

A little background:  The country of Bohemia was located mostly within the current boarders of the Czech Republic.  Sometime around 1500, Germans began moving to Bohemia, and German became the second official language there in 1627.  There was animosity between the native Czechs and the German settlers tho, so most of the separate German villages were around the edges of the country. Some of my Hesch relatives were among those settlers.  Many of them settled around Buckman, Minnesota.  The Czech government is currently digitizing the church books from all those tiny villages, starting with southern Bohemia, exactly where the Heschs and Brandls lived pre-1850, see?  (BTW, when we looked for the Hesch name near Neuhaus (Jindrichuv Hradec on the map), we saw the name BRANDL ocassionally too, so it wasn't only in Hagenfurth).

AND, this gives us a reason to look in the online church books provided HERE.  Click the "Littera Scripta manet" button, then "Parish Registers", then "Roman Catholic Church".  If you just want to see what the books look like, try any letter there, then any parish.  Try a B (births) book in the mid-1800s as they're a little more legible to us.
.......................
Oh darn! we'll need to wait till they get to the "V" villages...they're doing the "R"s now.  Check back in...six months?