Did your ancestors have a university degree? Find out using a new app

The Charles University Archive has launched an online app for searching for university doctorates. After putting scanned registries online last year, app users can now also search amongst the data of more than 24 thousand students and find out if their ancestors were doctors of the university, or even how many academics came from the most remote mountain villages. Also online are scanned registries of doctors of the German University in Prague.

The app contains records of doctors of Charles University from the years 1882 to 1939, i.e. from the division of the institution into Czech and German universities until the closing of the Czech universities by the Nazis. Personal data protection laws mean that post-war records will not be released for some time yet.

Name-based searches allow users to find out how many of their ancestors or namesakes graduated from the university, when and from which faculty, where they came from, what religion they were and what the occupations of their parents were. Amongst the other interesting features available to both experts and the lay public are searches based on place names, faulty or year of end of study.

Kafka, Brod and Cori – famous Germans online

The scanned records of the German University in Prague from the years 1882-1945 are to be put online for the first time. Currently these can only be leafed through like normal books; a search option will be provided later.

Similarly to the Czech registries, the German ones also record the graduations of a number of prominent persons, including the writers Franz Kafka and Max Brod, Nobel laureates Gerty Theresa Radnitz and Karl Ferdinand Cori and Josef Pfitzner, historian and Deputy Mayor of Prague during the Nazi occupation.

Another innovation that will be appreciated primarily by researchers from abroad is the English version of the website.

The ‘Students of Prague universities 1882-1945’ digitalisation project is a joint project between the CU Archive and the CU Institute for Computer Science, whose objective it is to gradually digitalise and put online registers, rigorous protocols, protocols on state exams and catalogues of undergraduates of the Czech and German Universities in Prague, i.e. data on more than 100 thousand students.

The project was initiated in the autumn of 2011 with the archiving of official university records and the scanning of sixteen registries of doctors of the Czech University from the years 1882-1953. In spring 2012 the Institute for Computer Science developed a database for the publication of these records. The website was launched in April 2012.

More than a year after its launch, the website still enjoys the interest of researchers, receiving an average of four thousand visitors every day, who each search an average 40 pages of digitalised archive material. It can be said, with only a slight exaggeration, that each of the digitalised pages made available online has been displayed at least six times.

This year the digitalisation project, which forms part of Charles University’s Long-Term Plan for the year 2011-2015, was supported by a grant from the Institutional Development Plan of the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport, thanks to which it was possible to construct a digitalisation office within the university archive, the chief component of which is a colour book scanner.

Franz Kafka was awarded a double (Roman and canon) law degree in 1906

Max Brod ALSO GRADUATED FROM THE German faculty of law in 1907

Record of the graduation of Edvard Beneš in 1909

Karel Čapek became a doctor of philosophy in 1915

One Václav Hampl, namesake of the current Rector, graduated from the Faculty of Medicine in 1903