In 1622, four years after the battle of White Mountain sparked the Thirty Years War, Austrian troops burned down the tiny farming village of Slavošovice while trying to suppress the rebellion in Bohemia. The Herda family, who had lived is Slavošovice for some unknown number of generations prior to 1622 but were displaced by the burning and the years of war, returned home when the village was rebuilt. Since the village was most likely rebuilt in a slightly different location using the stones from the original houses, it is difficult to determine the original location precisely. The Herdas moved into a small house, Slavošovice 14, and farmed the land there throughout the remaining years of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, into the early 1800s, until some great-great-great-grand-descendent of the man and woman who first returned to the newly rebuilt village chose to migrate to a town called Lišov, about 6 kilometers away.

After spending a couple of days in Vienna with my brother, who is visiting from the US, the three of us took a train to southern Bohemia to visit our ancestral homeland. My brother is an avid amateur genealogist and has for the past two or three years been employing a professional Czech genealogical researcher named Jaroslav to visit the Czech archives in South Bohemia to find the birth, marriage, death, and land ownership records that have helped us to sweep a bit of our lineage free from the accumulated dust of history. Jaroslav met us when we arrived in Lišov in our rental car and gave us a guided tour of certain select parts of South Bohemia. He led us through the churchyard graves in Lišov and pointed out our ancestors' headstones. He took us past the house where they lived for some number of generations after leaving Slavošovice. He knocked on one door in town in order to introduce us to Mr. Kovařík, an 82-year-old man with one leg shaped like a waning crescent moon who shares with us the common ancestors who lived in the house at Slavošovice 14. Mr. Kovařík showed us some pictures of his house when it was still a farmhouse, and he shared the old yellow documents that dispersed the possessions of some unknown Herda or another who had died without a will. He then pulled from his cupboard a lovely State of Minnesota baseball hat, obviously unworn, the brim still fresh, flat and rigid, which had been given to him by a member of the Dale Pexa band when they visited Lišov from New Prague, Minnesota (pop. approx. 5100) two years ago. He donned the hat with a mighty and sparsely-toothed grin. "Just like an American," he proclaimed.

The next stop, we were told, would be the small castle that used to protect the villages near Slavošovice before the Thirty Years War. It turned out to be a small two-story stone building, about twenty feet on a side, that the family currently living in the adjoining house used as a storage shed. When we pulled up in our rental car, a young blonde girl, maybe nine years old, stood at the gate with a curious stare. Jaroslav jumped out of the car to introduce himself and us. "Hello, ladies," he called out to the middle-aged women who were enjoying their afternoon tea in the courtyard, one of whom had obviously stopped by while walking with her stroller and a couple of kids of walking age. "I have brought some American tourists to see the castle." We took some pictures, trying not to step on all the chickens in the yard, and stepped inside the castle for a moment to see the boxes and old garden tools kept inside. One of the women, who had stepped into the house, returned with an old laminated pencil sketch of the castle as it had looked a few hundred years ago, namely, exactly the same but without their house attached. A young boy, maybe ten, followed her out wearing only his underwear.

Jaroslav expressed our many thanks, and we returned to the car. Some of the children followed to watch us drive away. We sped on to the next stop, the ornate neogothic crypt that houses the remains of the members of the Schwarzenberg dynasty who ruled the area for hundreds of years and owned several South Bohemian castles and chateaux right up until the last descendant fled the country in 1947.

C. and I usually try to be the kind of travelers who observe silently from the sidelines as inconspicuously as our huge backpacks will allow, but Jaroslav had volunteered to be our tour guide In fact, he hadn't really given us much choice, and since we had so many remote places to visit in such a short span of time, the renting of the car made sense. Nonetheless, pulling up in our shining silver Peugot, interrupting tea-time with the chickens, snapping some digital photos and disappearing in a cloud of gravel dust—all at Jaroslav's arranging—had made us look like the worst kind of culture consumers, swooping down into these villagers' lives for all of ten minutes, to documents in our scrapbooks the quaintness that constitutes their everyday lives before we moved on to the next hurried item on our itinerary.

That next item was the house at Slavošovice 14, where for centuries my Czech ancestors lived life as peasants on lands owned alternately by various barons, monasteries, and princes, ancestors whose names are known now only because of the hours Jaroslav has spent deducing the salient details of their lives from the remnant bureaucratic paperwork of the lost centuries between us. We didn't knock on this door, because Jaroslav has tried before to gather information from the people who now live there. They are not interested in genealogy and do not like foreigners. While taking a couple of token digital pictures of the house, I tried to imagine generations of Herdas being born, growing up, choosing a husband or wife from the eight or ten other teens in the village, bearing children, hoping for a male child so the land would stay in the family, dying and being buried in the same church yard, for hundreds of years on end. The oldest son in each family, Jaroslav tells us, didn't have to worry about choosing a wife, as he was usually constrained to wed the daughter of the neighboring farmer, in order for the families to be able to merge their farming rights—not the ownership of the land, because that belonged to the prince, but merely the right to farm a piece of it. I tried to imagine all these scenes played out a dozen times or more over a dozen lifetimes or more in that house on that piece of land, and the similar scenes played out on every other farm for hundreds of miles around, but I just couldn't manage. It's just too far away.