Czechia Emigration and Immigration

Online Records

 * Immigrants from Moravia, index
 * 1847-1869 Czech Immigration Passenger Lists, Volume IV, e-book. New York 1847-1869.
 * 1850-1934 Auswandererlisten, 1850-1934 (Hamburg passenger lists) at FamilySearch, images.
 * 1850-1934 Hamburg Passenger Lists, 1850-1934 at Ancestry, ($) index and images.
 * 1855-1924 Hamburg Passenger Lists, Handwritten Indexes, 1855-1934 at Ancestry, ($) images.
 * Hamburg, Germany Emigrants at Findmypast, ($) index.
 * 1878-1960 UK and Ireland, Incoming Passenger Lists, 1878-1960, at Ancestry.com, index and images. ($)
 * 1890-1960 Passenger Lists Leaving UK 1890-1960 at Findmypast; index & images ($). Search with locations Czechoslovakia, Bohemia, and Moravia.
 * 1892-1924 New York Passenger Arrival Lists (Ellis Island), 1892-1924 Search results for Czechoslovakia
 * 1892-1924 New York Passenger Arrival Lists (Ellis Island), 1892-1924 Search results for Bohemia
 * 1892-1924 New York Passenger Arrival Lists (Ellis Island), 1892-1924 Search results for Moravia
 * 1938-1945 All Palestine, Illegal Immigration from German-Occupied Europe, 1938-1945 - at Ancestry, index.($)
 * 1939-1941 Czechoslovakia, Selected Jewish Holocaust Records, 1939-1941 - at Ancestry, index. ($)
 * Czechoslovakia, Jewish Applications for Social Welfare After World War II - at Ancestry, index.($)
 * 1939-1946 Czechoslovakia, Social Welfare and Repatriation Records of Holocaust Survivors, 1939-1946 - at Ancestry, index.($)
 * 1942-1943 Riga, Latvia, Austrian, Czech, and German Jews, 1942-1943 - at Ancestry, index. Names of about 800 Jewish forced laborers from Austria, Czechoslovakia and Germany. ($)
 * 1943-1945 Czechoslovakia, Jews Deported to Terezin and Poland, 1943-1945 - at Ancestry, index.($)
 * 1946-1971 Free Access: Africa, Asia and Europe, Passenger Lists of Displaced Persons, 1946-1971 Ancestry, free. Index and images. Passenger lists of immigrants leaving Germany and other European ports and airports between 1946-1971. The majority of the immigrants listed in this collection are displaced persons - Holocaust survivors, former concentration camp inmates and Nazi forced laborers, as well as refugees from Central and Eastern European countries and some non-European countries.

Czech Immigration Passenger Lists (not online)
and at (FS Library book 973 W3bL) can be a useful source of genealogical information. There are 9 volumes:
 * Czech Immigration Passenger Lists, Volume I Galveston 1848-1861, 1865-1871 New Orleans 1848-1879
 * Czech Immigration Passenger Lists, Volume II Galveston 1896-1906 New Orleans 1879-1899
 * Czech Immigration Passenger Lists, Volume III Galveston 1907-1914
 * Czech Immigration Passenger Lists, Volume IV, e-book. New York 1847-1869.
 * Czech Immigration Passenger Lists, Volume V New York 1870-1880
 * Czech Immigration Passenger Lists, Volume VI New York 1881-1886, Galveston 1880-1886
 * Czech Immigration Passenger Lists, Volume VII New York 1887-1896
 * Czech Immigration Passenger Lists, Volume VIII Baltimore 1834-1879
 * Czech Immigration Passenger Lists, Volume IX Baltimore 1880-1899

Finding the Town of Origin in the Czech Republic
If you are using emigration/immigration records to find the name of your ancestors' town in the Czech Republic, see Czech Republic Finding Town of Origin for additional research strategies.

Czech Republic Emigration and Immigration
"Emigration" means moving out of a country. "Immigration" means moving into a country. Emigration and immigration sources list the names of people leaving (emigrating) or arriving (immigrating) in the country. These sources may be passenger lists, permissions to emigrate, or records of passports issued. The information in these records may include the emigrants’ names, ages, occupations, destinations, and places of origin or birthplaces. Sometimes they also show family groups.

Immigration to Czech Lands

 * Largest groups of foreign residents
 * Ukraine	145,153
 * Slovakia	121,278
 * Vietnam	61,910
 * Russian Federation	38,010
 * Poland	21,767
 * Germany	21,478
 * Bulgaria	17,183
 * Romania	16,824
 * In the 2001 census, 39,106 Czech citizens, or around 0.4% of the Czech Republic's total population, declared German ethnicity.
 * There is a small community of Greeks in the Czech Republic. The Greek presence in Czech Republic is dated to the 20th century. Roughly 12,000 Greek citizens, mainly from Greek Macedonia in Northern Greece, who fled from the 1946-1949 Greek Civil War were settled in several formerly German inhabited areas in Czechoslovakia.
 * There is a small community of ethnic Macedonians in the Czech Republic. Among the refugees of the Greek Civil War who were admitted to Czechoslovakia in the late 1940s, roughly 4,000 were of Macedonian ethnicity; they resettled primarily in the Czech portion of the country.
 * The Ukrainian national minority in the Czech Republic together with the citizens of Ukraine make up the largest membership base with more than 203,198 members. Labour migration from Ukraine or southeast Slovakia to what is now the Czech Republic began to grow to a large scale in the early 1990s. In 1991, there were just 8,500 Ukrainian citizens on Czech territory. However, as of October 2018, figures of the Czech Statistical Office showed that number had grown to 132,481, making Ukrainians the largest group of foreigners in the Czech Republic, with a 30% share of the foreign population.
 * Vietnamese people in the Czech Republic, including residents and citizens, are the third-largest ethnic minority overall (after the Slovaks and Ukrainians), numbering more than 83,000 people according to the 2011 census. It is the third-largest Vietnamese diaspora in Europe, and one of the most populous Vietnamese diasporas of the world. Vietnamese immigrants began settling in Czechoslovakia during the Communist period, when they were invited as guest workers by the Czechoslovak government. Migration was encouraged by Vietnamese authorities, in the hope that the migrants would return with skills and training.

Emigration: The Czech Diaspora
The Czech diaspora refers to both historical and present emigration from the Czech Republic, as well as from the former Czechoslovakia and the Czech lands (including Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia). Czechs originate from the Czech lands, a term which refers to the majority of the traditional lands of the Bohemian Crown, namely Bohemia, Moravia and Czech Silesia. These lands over time have been governed by a variety of states, including the Kingdom of Bohemia, the Austrian Empire, Czechoslovakia, and the Czech Republic also known by its short-form name, Czechia.

Vienna

 * Around the start of the 20th century, Vienna was the city with the second-largest Czech population in the world (after Prague). At its peak, in 1900, 102,974 people claimed Czech or Slovak as their colloquial language. However, there are claims that the Czech minority numbered as high as 250,000-300,000, making Vienna a city with the second largest Czech speaking population, only after Prague.
 * After World War I, many Czechs and also nationalities returned to their ancestral countries, resulting in a decline in the Viennese population.
 * After World War II, the Soviets used force to repatriate key workers of Czech and Hungarian origins to return to their ethnic homelands to further the Soviet bloc economy. As of 2017, Vienna was home to around 14,500 Czechs.

Croatia

 * In 1699, Slavonia changed hands from the Ottomans to Habsburgs, and the Muslim population fled. This left large swathes of land vacant, and the Habsburgs started to colonize new lands with people from all parts of their Empire. The first Czechs arrived in Slavonia around the 1750s, and were settled in Western Slavonia throughout the 19th century. In Croatia, they could buy from ten or more acres of arable land for price of 1-acre (4,000 m2) they sold in the Czech lands.
 * Czechs also settled other parts of Croatia such as Gorski kotar, and bigger cities where they were praised as skilled workers and clerks, but were assimilated in two or three generations.
 * The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, established after the First World War, was very amicable to the Czech minority.
 * In Socialist, post World War II, Czechs enjoyed even greater rights, and more schools were opened.
 * Czechs are officially recognized as an autochthonous national minority, and as such, they, together with the Slovaks of Croatia, elect a special representative to the Croatian Parliament.

Ukraine

 * Between 1868 and 1880, almost 16,000 Czechs left Austria-Hungary for the Russian Empire. The reasons for their departure were the difficult living conditions in the Czech lands, and the rumors of prosperity in the Russian realm, where there was a large amount of unused agricultural land.
 * The bulk of the Czechs settled in the region of 'Volhynia. Apart from agriculture, Czech immigrants began to engage in other activities, such as industry, trade and crafts. The income for most ethnic Czechs had its foundations in the engineering, breweries, mills, cement plants, etc.
 * After World War II, the door of re-emigration for Volhynian Czechs to Czechoslovakia opened on the basis of an interstate agreement between the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and the Soviet Union. Some Volhynian Czechs remained in the Soviet Union even after the end of the Second World War.
 * At the end of the 1980s, ten thousand Czechs lived in Ukraine.

France
There is a substantial number of people in France with Czech ancestry, including 100,220 Czech-born people recorded as resident in France.

United States

 * Czech Americans known in the 19th and early 20th century as Bohemian Americans, are citizens of the United States whose ancestry is wholly or partly in the Czech Republic.
 * Germans from the Czech lands who emigrated to the United States are usually identified as German American, or, more specifically, as Americans of German Bohemian descent. According to the 2000 US census, there are 1,262,527 Americans of full or partial Czech descent, in addition to 441,403 persons who list their ancestry as Czechoslovak.
 * Immigrants from Bohemia generally immigrated through New York or other Eastern ports and initially settled in the Midwest, where the climate and farming was similar to their homeland.
 * Immigrants from Moravia often immigrated through Galveston, Texas instead of Eastern ports and many settled in Texas.

Canada
Czech Canadians were frequently called Bohemian Canadians until the late 19th century. According to the 2006 Canadian census, there were 98,090 Canadians of full or partial Czech descent.

Argentina

 * There are four waves Czech immigration periods to Argentina recognized as substantial. The first was slightly before World War 1, the second from 1920 to 1930, the third during World War II and the fourth, the smallest in proportion, during 1990 (after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe).
 * During the first two periods, the immigration group was mainly made up of workers and farmers motivated by economic reasons.
 * During the third period, Czech political exiles arrived, fled mainly due to the Nazi encroachment in Central Europe.
 * The smallest fourth immigration period is formed by different social classes and their immigration reasons are related to economic reasons and personal interests.
 * It is estimated that around 40,000 Czechs arrived in Argentina between World War I and 1970. Czechs settled mainly in Buenos Aires, Gran La Plata, Rosario and Chaco.