Links to check out:

Czechoslovak Genealogical Society International

The Czech & Slovak American Genealogy Society of Illinois

German-Bohemian Heritage Society (New Ulm, MN)

National Czech and Slovak Heritage Museum and Library (Cedar Rapids, IA)

Dvoracek Memorial Library (Wilber, NE) Go to their Genealogy tab. ​

Price County Genealogy Society,  (Phillips, WI) PCGS has the following resources: Cemetery Indexes of Price County, Wisconsin (tombstone inscriptions of all Price County cemeteries, published 2000); Price County Plat Maps 1890 with index, 1910, and 1920 with index; list of Czech-Slovak websites; and "getting started" handouts (pedigree chart, family group sheet, how-to research).

Wisconsin Historical Society
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Czech Genealogy Blog Especially for those with ancestors in Bohemia, Moravia & Silesia.

Lincoln Czechs Link Page (Lincoln, NE) Scroll down to their Geneology Links.

Ellis Island Passenger Search - For those families who came to the USA via Ellis Island

Ancestry.com , while not Czech-Slovak specific is a great resource for a lot of family research. You can create family trees and more.   

Creating a Family Tree

Some of you have arrived at this page in order to create a family tree for the Miss Czech-Slovak Pageant and you have no idea where to start, just that you've heard that your great-grandma came from Czechoslovakia. Others are here simply because you love genealogy. Either way, you've come to the right place. 

There are many ways to go about a family tree, but it all involves a bit of work.  But anything worth doing is going to take time and effort. A good place to start is simply by asking family members around you. 

To begin work on your family tree, start with yourself and work backward, gathering info from family, documents (birth/marriage/death records), and online sites (see links on the left) and then use any one of various templates to map names, dates, and places, focusing on core data (names, dates, locations) first, and adding stories as you build. Family stories are just as important to collect as the actual names and dates themselves. Maybe you can find an older family member and record their stories! Besides, one of these stories might inspire something in you. 

Once you have yourself down (including birth town, date), go on and add your birth parents (and siblings) and their info, then their parents and so on.  You'll want to search using maiden names, and once your history crosses the ocean, look out for  gendered endings (e.g., Novák/Nováková, Svoboda/Svobodová), diminutive forms (adding suffixes like -ček, -ík to create Nováček, Krejčík from Krejčí), and Anglicized spellings (like Womacka for Vomáčka or Shebesta for Šebesta), reflecting occupations, villages, locations, and traits. 

Finally, keep organizing this information. Putting it in a digital format will enable you to ask other family members to add to it. 

For the Miss Czech-Slovak WI State Queen Pageant, you need to trace your ancestry back to the Czech-Slovak lands. For some, this is only on one side of your family. For others, it's both.  For still others, you are tracing your adoptive parents heritage as that IS your family too.  Once you've started, you might find you want to keep digging deeper.