Prof. Jiří Velemínský was in particular an extraordinary and enthusiastic scientist. He was one of the first who investigated botanical genetics on the molecular level, thus he is regarded as founder of this research field in the Czech Republic. Prof. Jiří Velemínský was an excellent organizer of Czech research activities and also he was an outstanding personality. He died 23 February 2008. and Helena Illnerová.
The serf rolls (in German Mannschaftsbücher) were records of all hereditary serfs, which were annually compiled from the second half of the 17th century by the seigniorial offices in a number of Czech estates. They served to keep tabs on the serfs - recording their whereabouts and their fulfilment of obligations to the nobility. The records contained notes on the place of residence and changes in the life of the persons registered in them (e. g. if they left to enter into service or to become an apprentice, if they married or took over a piece of land, and when they died). Although one of the purposes of the serf rolls was to monitor the mobility of serfs, their usefulness for studying migration is limited. The rolls did not consistently record the whereabouts of people outside their place of residence, and people who were not serfs subordinate to the local manor were not recorded in the documentation. The study of migration using the serf rolls must therefore be narrowed to the question of how much of a role migration played in the formation of the age and gender structure of the population in specific localities. A study of four localities in Horní Police in 1710-1725 confirmed that people most often migrated at the age of 20-35 years. People of that age left home most often for the purpose of marriage. Typical for people over 35 years of age was the tendency to remain in one place, and typical for people over 50 years of age was their elimination from the records of the serf rolls, almost exclusively as a result of their death. Children up to the age of 15 tended to move with their parents.
The main heroes in this small study are the people who lived their lives mainly in the middle of the 17th century in small towns and villages in the region of Chýnov which lies in the southeast of Bohemia between Tábor and Pelhřimov. Their lives were filled with countless major events but one of the most important thing was certainly the birth of a child. The coming of every new human being was accompanied by a number of specific activities. Many of them were necessary, others useful and some of them were completely useless. One activity that was constantly a part of the first days of a new bom child’s life was baptism. Although at first glance it may appear that the register of child births is nothing but a long list of names of children, parents and godparents, this is incorrect. Birth registers also represent an important source of valuable information which can be used to estimate, among other things, the movements of people at that time over short distances within a limited geographic space and to observe the influence of various types of administrative units on their lives. The research focused on a territory with three parish churches that, in the middle of the 17th century were part of the Chýnov parish and its two chaplains. This regional complex, encompassing several estates, not only represents an area where people owned land and houses and remained almost immobile, but was also a landscape where for a number of reasons people moved from place to place. While it is clear that these shifts cannot be referred to as migrations, they nonetheless involved important moves motivated by economic, social or other reasons. The act of baptism and everything that it involved can also illustrate its influence, as well as the significance of natural conditions, territorial arrangements, the impact of urban locations on the rural environment and the complexity of Church administration during the period after the Battle of White Mountain.