Where does our family come from? Every person has asked this question at least once in his or her life. Usually he did not look for the answer and satisfied his curiosity by asking his father or grandfather – if he was still alive – and they told him what they knew or heard told by their parents and grandparents.
Thus the inquirer learned more or less accurately, but mostly incompletely, about some members of his family who had lived in the last hundred years. The knowledge of the parents or grandparents did not usually extend further.
The genealogical knowledge of many people deepened considerably during the “Protectorate”. At that time, it was ordered by the Reich authorities that every civil servant and public servant should obtain proof of “Aryan descent”, i.e. documents that his ancestors up to the third generation were not of Jewish origin. These were the baptismal and marriage certificates of the father and mother and their parents.
From these documents, everyone learned the birth dates of his father, mother, grandfathers and grandmothers and found out the names of their parents. They were the fourth generation. From this data, the inquisitive “researcher” could construct a simple family tree that went back to 1800, or in rare cases a few years further back. From the documents collected, many things could be gleaned, especially about the ancestors’ residence, age, occupation, social status and family relationships.
For many this knowledge was enough, for others it aroused further curiosity and they began to look deeper into their family. Most of these inquisitive people first searched in their surroundings, found bearers of the same surname and found out their family relations. The more eager ones listed namesakes from directories, phone books, advertisements, and businesses, sent out stacks of letters, and made appointments. People of the same surname visited each other, met, debated, borrowed documents, found common ancestors, and sought out stray members of their families and clans. They wrote to Vienna and Budapest, where one of their uncles or great-uncles had gone to learn to be a tailor, furrier, butcher or plasterer. There was an unusual stir in genealogical research. The amateurs were helped by experts – historians and archivists who began to deal with civil genealogy instead of noble genealogy. The knowledge of common ancestry or the discovery of kinship brought people together, so they were willing to help each other not only in genealogical research, but also in other matters, and this was very necessary during the “Protectorate”. The Czech people, threatened by Hitler’s occupation, gathered in droves, the nation returning to the roots of its existence, as President Dr. Edvard Beneš recommended from exile. In spite of all the difficulties, the Czech nation lived in this difficult time, lived intensely, even though the crown of its tree was much broken.
Associations and societies were formed to promote genealogical research. Their members provided each other with information, procured extracts from registers and communicated discoveries. The Genealogical Society even published a professional journal during the occupation. What a freedom in unfreedom!
My interest in my ancestors was also aroused by the acquisition of documents of “Aryan” origin. I began to inquire about them, but the result was poor. Both of my grandfathers had died before I was born, so the thread of family tradition was broken. All I knew was that Vermouzci were only found in Kuřim and Lelekovice. There were two families in Kuřim. One was spelled with an “s”, Vermousek, the other with a “z”, Vermouzek, and they didn’t even know if they were related.
I also knew that our surname was not a common one, that there were very few bearers of it, and this again stimulated my curiosity. I decided to find out what I could find out and that is when the work on the Vermouzek family chronicle began.
It’s easy to make a resolution, but it’s harder to follow through. I had a great desire to do the research, but I had no idea how difficult, lengthy and extensive the work was. I could not imagine how many hours, days, weeks, months, and years one must sacrifice to find and trace all the members of the family and discover even a fraction of their life stories. I had no experience in this work and I did not even know how to begin.
At that time – it was in 1941 – I got my hands on a small book whose author was the historian and local history worker PhDr. Ladislav Hosák. It was called “How to start a family chronicle”. It was a detailed guide to the work and a recommendation on the best way to start researching in the registers. A short time later there was a genealogy seminar in Tišnov, to which I was sent. There I got acquainted not only with Prof. Hosák, but also with his collaborator Prof. Klein. Both of them later provided me with valuable information during my research.
Later, when I wanted to start my research in the registers, the first obstacle came in my way: the registers were not in the parishes, but were withdrawn and for security reasons stored in a shelter in the Convent of the Brothers of Mercy in Letovice. In less than a year they were returned and I was able to research. Of course, I started in Kuřim, where my father was born, but the willingness of Dean Dvořák was not very great. Not surprisingly, all the Vermouzians left the Roman Catholic Church in 1921 and 1922 and joined the newly formed Czechoslovak Church or remained without religion. I thought my path to further research was closed, but chance helped. When I got married at the end of 1940, we lived with my wife’s parents in Nuzířov No. 22. The old miller, who was in his eighties, was a relative of my mother-in-law. He was very intelligent, with a good memory. He kept the village chronicle and wrote the chronicle of the Zandovsky family.
The Germans ordered that the municipal chronicles must be handed over, but Mr. Žandovský disobeyed this strict order, hid the chronicles and wrote to the office that they were lost. Only he and perhaps his two sons knew about it. However, they perished in a concentration camp and the chronicle has not been found to this day.
I am writing this because there might be some mention of the Vermouzzes in it. The old miller, when he learned who I was and what my name was, surprised me by saying that there were Vermouzci at Skalička as well. I did not want to believe him at first and asked where he had news of them. He told me that his father remembered them and that he had records of them from the registers of Újezda u Černá Hora, where Skalička was a parish.
A few days later I went to Újezd. Mr. Motáček, the parish priest, was very helpful, even though he could not understand what I wanted at first. I had been to Újezd several times and from the records I had obtained, I compiled a “family tree” of the Vermouzkas. As it turned out later, it was incorrect. Once the parish priest of Újezd surprised me by telling me that there had been an inquiry from Ostrov u Macochy about a Vermouzka who had married a Hrnčíř from Dlouhá Lhota. He informed me that there was no record of this marriage in the Újezd registers, but that it might have been in Dlouhá Lhota. It was another clue and I immediately started following it.
About a month later I set off from the Drásov school, where I was teaching at the time, on my bicycle to Dlouha Lhota. It was dry down there, full spring, whereas up there, at Dlouha Lhota, it was cold, muddy, and in places still snowing. The parish priest was helpful, but he assured me that Vermouzci was not in his registers, that the registration would be at Lipůvka. I immediately went to Lipůvka and there the parish priest Jeřábek surprised me by telling me that there were Vermouzci in the registers, that they had been there for about 150 years and that there were many of them. I had it at hand from my place of residence – Nuzířov – and I arranged with him permission to search the registers. I went to the Lipa parish and went through the old records line by line, page by page. It was tedious work.
The notes were written on coarse, unglazed, handmade paper, with quill pens, in home-cooked inks that have faded to illegibility over the centuries. Alongside the beautiful, beautifully written pages, where every entry was an artistic, graphic expression that I did not want to believe was written with a goose quill, the registers contained entries that were completely illegible, written in the shaky hand of old parish priests or cantors, many of whom had more at heart the tithe and the proceeds of their own holdings than the registers. How slowly, how desperately slowly the work went forward! How few leaves could be read or deciphered in half a day! I had no practice in reading, nor did I know the meaning of the abbreviations commonly used by parish priests in keeping the registers. Another difficulty was that the language of the entries changed, they were written in Latin, later in Czech, and from the time of Emperor Joseph II in German. I did not have any difficulties with German, while parish priest Jeřábek helped me with Latin. Researching the registers was hard work, but at least for a while one forgot about the hardships of occupation and war, supply and other difficulties, political oppression, concentration camps, executions and martial law.
In the earliest times, civil registry records are incomplete, missing not only individual data, but often entire years. Here every trace and every record is precious. In order to examine even the smallest detail, it was necessary not only to go through the registers of births, deaths and marriages, but also to examine godparents at baptisms and witnesses at weddings. I lost many days and evenings in this work. Fortunately, there was not much studying during the Protectorate; there were coal, winter and other holidays, of which I made abundant use.
I searched for Lipovka in my spare time for over two years. Records of the Vermouzce family were still spreading, some branches of the family reached the villages of Šebrovo and Svatá Kateřina in the Blansko district. It was necessary to keep a close eye on these individual branches. In order not to lose any trace, I also searched in the registers in Blansko and Řečkovice, where the villages of Šebrov, Svatá Kateřina and for some time also Lelekovice belonged. However, I found nothing in Blansko, a wasted journey – lost time.
To make my work easier, I made contact with the Vermouzkys in Lelekovice. I did not know them, I wrote there and Václav Vermouzek, a peasant in Lelekovice No. 24, replied. He was also interested in the history of his family, he thought about it very often and he had at home over a hundred years old departure and marriage contracts. He lent me some of them. He also told me that the records of the Lelekovice branch of the Vermouzk family were in the registry office in Vranov and he willingly provided me with several records. They were not complete, even when I supplemented them with data I obtained from the documents I borrowed from him. I had no choice but to go to Vranov and copy all the records relating to the Vermouzkes.
The transcripts and extracts from the registers were unprocessed material which I had to sort, compile and combine at home, and it was only here that errors in reading, copying, entries, incomplete records and inaccurate data appeared. When comparing the data, I came across records where the age of the deceased differed from his birth by up to ten years. This is quite hard to understand, but if we put ourselves in the mind of the time, it is easily explained. Records were often made ‘by eye’, people who often could neither read nor write could not remember when they were born or how old they were, survivors gave ages as they thought they were, and the parish priest did not want to look up birth dates.
These inaccurate records made the work much more difficult and required new visits to the parishes, new searches, checks, corrections and additions. While studying the Vranov and Rechkovice registers, the Lelekovice branch of the Vermousks began to emerge, but it was not complete. It was necessary to search elsewhere for the missing members. Through hard work I gained some experience and on the basis of it I corrected my previous work. I went again to the parish in Újezda u Černá Hora and there I found that there was not only one branch of Vermousks in Skalička, but three. One had disappeared and two more had appeared.
It was a surprise for me! And still no news about the Vermouzkys from Kuřim, no connection with the Vermouzkys either from Lelekovice or from Lipůvka. To top it all, the Kuřim registers were inaccessible again at that time, they were like all the others, in the Convent of the Brothers of Mercy in Letovice, to protect them from air raids. Again I found myself at a standstill and delayed for about a year.
However, chance favored me again. A young chaplain Pekárek came to Kuřim. He had a completely different understanding of my work than the old dean. I arranged with him and we went to Letovice. The registrar, Councillor Zásměta, an old retired priest who had lived his whole life somewhere in Slovácko, allowed me to search the registers and even helped me himself. He was happy to do so, especially when I brought him my smoking ration, two cigars, which he liked so much and which were in great short supply during the war. Thus began my travels to Letovice.
Later on I always went there for two days and ate and slept in the monastery. That was in the winter of 1944-45. Every week I worked in the registry office for two days, and because the front was already approaching from the south I was in a hurry. Younger boys from Moravia and Bohemia were taken to Hungary and Austria to dig trenches. Even in the north the Germans were already retreating. On one trip to Letovice I met Germans – emigrants who had taken the estates of the Poles after the defeat of Poland in 1939. Now they were fleeing from the Red Army and believed they were going to the farms in Bohemia and Bavaria.
I was in a hurry with the statements because I was afraid that fire or bombing would destroy the registers. I was in Letovice about five or six times. On my last visit, the monastery and hospital were already occupied by the German army. In the room where the registers were kept, the Germans had a store of provisions. I used to go there with the Councillor Zásmeta. Once, when the German Feldwebel asked him sharply what I was doing there, the Councilor told him briefly “Forschung” (research). And strangely enough, the German was satisfied with that.
I have almost finished the listings, only some corrections I was finishing just before the queue at the rectory in Letovice. The registers were taken there because the monastery was completely sealed off by the army and civilians were forbidden to enter. That was my last trip to Letovice. Traffic was already slow, the lines were overcrowded with troop transports. The Germans with a large number of tanks were rushing to Hungary, where the Red Army was pushing. The Hungarians in turn went to Germany against the English and the Americans. There was already nervousness and anxiety everywhere. I packed and stored the notes in several places so that my efforts would not be destroyed by fire or by the fighting that was to be expected. In Letovice I learned that the Vermouzzi had been in Kuřim since 1735 and that they had come there from Skalička.
In Kuřim, the Vermouzci were very large, there used to be up to eight families, most of them after 1800. At that time, 109 children with the surname Vermouzek were born there in a hundred years. Most of the families died out and basically two branches survived. In the last and the generation before that, the family grew again.
Today, there are seven Vermouzek families around the world. These are two branches from Kurim, of which it was not known how they are related, two families in Lelekovice, one of which will die out, two families in Brno and one in Ceska u Brna.
I knew all of the Kuřim Vermouzkys, and we were acquainted with members of our branch. However, I only knew about the Lelekovice ones from hearsay. When I started working on the family tree, I came into contact with them. I have written to them and each of them is helping me to the best of their ability.
After the liberation in 1945 I enlisted as a reserve officer and I stopped working on the chronicle. I was in the army for almost a year. When I came back, I had other things on my mind. I spent a lot of time fighting for the house I had bought in 1948, which had been taken away from me as a result of political events. I couldn’t concentrate on my work. It was only in 1951 that I took it up again very intensively. I studied the Kurim town registers in the Brno City Archives, the cadastres in the State Archives in Brno, and I found out some data from the Knínica chronicler Josef Dvořáček, who wrote the Kurim municipal chronicle.
Since all the old registers were in the meantime concentrated in the State Archive in Brno and the newer ones in the registry offices, I worked there as well. I used to go to Brno on a motorcycle. On one of the trips I was stopped on a small hill near Ivanovice by a member of the National Security Service. He was checking motor vehicles, driving and identity cards. When he read my name on the papers, he said: “Vermouzek, there are a lot of them!” I immediately seized on his remark and asked him how he knew. He told me that he had worked in making new identity cards and that he had just made Vermouzky. He had to return one to get his papers in order. Some were written with an “s” and others with a “z” (Vermousek-Vermouzek).
I asked him where the IDs were issued and where the filing cabinet was. He told me that it was in Trnita in Brno, but that it was not open to the public. I already had the ointment for that. I was studying at the University of Brno at the time, where they gave me confirmation that I needed the data from the police file for scientific purposes, and everything went smoothly.
The clerk at Trnita couldn’t understand what I was after at first, but when he did, he read me all the Vermouzkys he had in his file. I think there were about 29 of them from all over Moravia. I was most pleased that none of them were missing from my records, so I had done a good job. With a bit of mischievous joy I promised him 1000 CZK in the new currency – that was almost my entire monthly income – if he discovered any extra Vermouzkas. I knew he wouldn’t, and even if he had, I think I would have gladly given him the promised reward.
I was in a hurry to get to work, and I don’t know why. I enlisted the cooperation of Arnost Vermousek, a court clerk from Kuřim. He took extracts from the land registers of the Vermouks’ home property, its acquisitions, sales, encumbrances and other changes. He also copied the chronicle for me several times. (That was – damn – pulp! – he finally sighed.)
In the spring I got the cooperation of my cousin Ing. Čestmír Vermouzek from Brno, who took photographic images from the old land registers. Both of them did it with unusual interest and willingness.
Then there was a long break in the work. I fought for the house in Nuzířov, even though I knew I would not get anything. Then I went to school in Těšany and changed my life program: instead of worrying about the house, I devoted myself to my studies. I studied at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Brno. It took a lot of time and the chronicle rested for the time being.
It was not until the New Year 1976 that I found myself in the house in Moravské Knínice doing the final editing of our chronicle. I still had to trace a branch of the Vermouzkas who lived for some time in Králová Polje.
Our family name is very unusual, and almost everyone who hears it for the first time ponders it. It is neither Czech, nor German, Slovak, Polish, or Hungarian. Before the First World War it was only found in Kuřim and Lelekovice. Elsewhere it was completely unknown and I have not been able to find any Vermouzek anywhere. Neither my father Jindřich, nor his brothers Linhart and Jaroslav, who travelled a good part of the world as journeymen. All three of them were in the First World War from beginning to end, and even then they did not come across this name.
My father’s brother, Jaroslav, and my cousin Josef, son of Filip Vermouzek from Kuřim, both worked in the post office after the First World War and although they both paid good attention, they never encountered a parcel destined for anywhere other than Kuřim, Lelekovice or Moravské Knínice, where my father had married. Nor did any of the other members of the family meet a Vermouzek whom they could not place in the family.
It has happened several times that someone has claimed to know a Vermouzek that I do not know, but it has always been misinformation. If someone asks us Vermouzkas for our surname, he will certainly ask twice, because he has never heard it. If he has ever met a Vermouzek, he doesn’t fail to point it out and ask if he is a relative of ours.
The unusualness of the name is best illustrated by the incidents which the Vermouzki themselves have experienced. One of them was told to me by Uncle Linhart, my father’s brother.
He trained as a tailor with the Dostals in Král Pole. He worked as a journeyman in various places, then went to Freiburg (Breisgau) in Germany for experience. There he worked in a large workshop and learned German diligently. My uncle said:
Once the master called me to try on a suit for an elderly gentleman. He started to speak to me in German, but I just shook my head that I didn’t understand. He tried French, and when I didn’t answer this time either, the master asked what nationality I was. He learned that I was Czech. He asked where I was from. I told him I was from Kuřim and my name was Vermouzek. He asked what the German name of the village was. I knew this because it was written on a bilingual board on the outskirts of the village and the train conductors used to call out Gurein – Kurim! The customer reminisced for a while and then said, Gurein, Gurein, there is a church, a rectory and a castle on the hill. There is a farm below the rectory and Bürgermeister Vermouzek lived there. He was General Graf von Dömling, commander of the Baden army in the First World War. You know, I was touched abroad!
Uncle Linhart had a similar experience in Vienna during the First World War. To avoid having to go to the front, he applied for agricultural leave. They only had a small field at home, but he claimed they had land. On top of that, he faked illness, made himself lame and walked on crutches. When the governor asked him how he was going to work if he couldn’t even walk, he promptly replied that he would at least look after him. He was not to be deterred. Feldwebel angrily asked him where he was from and what his name was. In the prescribed military manner, the uncle reported that his name was Vermouzek and that he was from Kuřim. Feldvébl paused, was silent for a moment, and then said exactly the same thing as General Dömling had said about the church, the castle and the rectory on the hill, and about Bürgermeister Vermouzek, who lived below the rectory.
Later we often wondered how Graf von Dömling knew Kuřim. We concluded that he might have been there as a military aide-de-camp on some manoeuvres of the Austrian army, or, more likely, he had taken part as a young officer in the Prussian-Austrian war in 1866. This would be consistent with his age; the general was then (1911) about 65 years old.
The Feldwebel with whom my uncle dealt in Vienna may have served in Brno and known Kurim because Kurim was a military bivouac used for troop movements. Soldiers were divided into quarters by house. The main role was played by the mayor – Bürgermeister – who dealt with the soldiers and whom the soldiers remembered. The officers were housed either in the castle or in the rectory. This stuck in their minds, because both of these buildings are together in Kuřim.
For a long time we could not find out who this Bürgermeister Vermouzek was. Finally we came to the conclusion that it could not have been anyone else but Vincenc Vermousek, who was a cantor and municipal scribe in Kuřim. He knew German, he dealt with the soldiers instead of the mayor and they considered him the mayor.
Scribe Vincenc Vermousek was unmarried and lived with his brother František on his family land No. 56 in Kuřim under the rectory. The officers also remembered this. The cantor and scribe Vincenc Vermousek was well known to Jan Poláček from the tavern under the church. When he told us about him during the Protectorate, he was the oldest citizen of Kuřim, he was ninety-two years old. My maternal grandmother’s brother, Antonín Škára, born in Moravské Knínice, also remembered Vermousek well. He had seen him as a young boy. Vincenc used to teach at the castle, where there used to be two classes in the Kuřim municipal school.
I, too, was twice convinced that our name was not common. In 1929, when I applied for the graduate course of the Teacher’s Institute in Brno, the then director of the Institute, Dr. František Višinka, asked me if Colonel MUDr. Vermousek was my relative. Of course I said yes. At home I asked my father if he knew MUDr. Vermousek. He told me that he came from the land No. 56 in Kuřim under the rectory and that he was a military doctor. It was only fifteen years later, while compiling the civil records, that I found out that the doctor’s and my ancestor were brothers in 1750.
When I was serving in 1933-34 in the 10th Infantry Regiment of Jan Sladky-Kozina in Brno at Špilberk, a lance corporal from the infirmary came to me and showed me a ticket of a soldier from Košice who had been fed, which was signed by a military doctor, Lieutenant Colonel MUDr. František Vermousek. He came to me on purpose because of the unusualness of the name.
The grotesque incident with our unusual name happened at the end of the fifties far from the homeland, at the airport in Moscow. My cousin Miloš Vermouzek, then the head of the testing room of MEZ – Moravian Electrotechnical Works in Drásov, was flying somewhere east on business. When changing planes at the Moscow airport, a stewardess handed him his suitcase. Milos looked at it and said, “That’s not mine!” “It says Vermouzek on it,” the stewardess insisted. “I can see that”, says Milos, “but whose suitcase it is, I don’t know, unless there’s another Vermouzek, but that’s impossible!” Then, out of the crowd of passengers, a tall man with glasses pushes his way to the stewardess and takes the suitcase. “That’s mine,” he says. Milos looks at the guy for a moment and says, “Who are you?” “I’m Mirek Jaroslav’s.” “I’m Milos Richard.” They were cousins. They lived in neighbouring houses in Kuřim near the train station. Mirek moved with his mother to Brno when he was thirteen, Miloš grew up in Kuřim. They had not seen each other for more than twenty-five years.