English · Česky
The Dobesh Society Spolek Dobešů

Vítejte, Dobešové!

doh-beh-SHOH-veh · Welcome, all of you who carry the name

Dobeš is the old Czech affectionate form of Tobiáš, and Tobiáš, from the Hebrew Ṭōḇiyyāh, means God is good. Everyone who carries the name carries that sentence inside it. The name stands in the written record without a break back to 1656, the year Jakub Dobeš was baptized at Rouchovany in Moravia. He had been born in the 1620s, a child of the Thirty Years' War. Two hundred and fifteen years after that baptism, on 12 April 1871, his descendant Tomáš Dobeš boarded the steamship Berlin at Bremen with seven children, the youngest of them four months old, and came ashore at Baltimore about nineteen days after that. They went on to Saunders County, Nebraska, and there the American half of the story begins. The Dobesh Society exists to gather everyone the name has reached, in every spelling, on both sides of the water.

Read the whole story

The Registry is free. Please sign it.

Before the Society is anything else, it is an attempt to find the family. The Registry is the front door, it costs nothing, and it is open worldwide. Tell us your name, where your branch settled, and how your people spell it. In return you get a short letter once a month and, as the map fills in, the names of cousins you did not know you had.

What the Registry asks

Consent. Nothing is stored until you agree to it. Your entry is never published, never sold, and never shared. Living people do not appear on this site. Ask us to delete you and we delete you. The whole promise is written out on the privacy page.

The sign-up form is being wired now. Until it goes live, one email does exactly the same work. The link below opens a message with the questions already in it.

Sign the Registry by email

or write to hello@dobesh.org in your own words

Who belongs. Anyone who bears the name in any of its spellings (Dobeš, Dobes, Dobesh, Dobesch, Dobisch, Dobiáš, Dobias), everyone descended from it whatever their surname is today, spouses, and Friends of the Dobešové. Nobody has to prove anything to walk in the door.

The 1656 Founders' Circle

56 seats

Fifty-six lifetime seats, for the fifty-six of 1656, the year the record begins with the baptism of Jakub Dobeš at Rouchovany. Two hundred fifty dollars, once. Founders are members for life, their names stand permanently at dobesh.org/founders, and the money is earmarked for three things and nothing else: the archive-forever fund, the care of the ancestral graves, and the first scholarship for a young Dobesh.

See the Founders' Circle

The moments that are coming

The Society's calendar is not invented. It is the family's own dates, kept.

  1. Fall 2026 The Registry opens quietly. Word goes first to the cousins and to the families met at the Wilber Czech Festival.
  2. 6 December 2026 The Sheaf, Issue 1. Saint Nicholas Day, chosen for Mikuláš Dobeš, who died in 1731. The first issue of the family journal goes to everyone on the Registry.
  3. 26 March 2027 The Society goes public. The immigrant's 199th birthday, and the opening of a one-year countdown to the bicentennial. Membership and the Founders' Circle open to all.
  4. 6 to 8 August 2027 Dobešfest, the first gathering, with a Dobesh tent at the Wilber Czech Festival in Nebraska. Wilber falls on the first full weekend of August, always.
  5. 26 March 2028 The Bicentennial. Two hundred years to the day from the birth of Tomáš Dobeš at Rouchovany.
  6. Summer 2028 The Rouchovany Pilgrimage. The family goes back to the parish of its own baptisms.
  7. Farther out 2031, the 160th year of the crossing. And 2056, the four hundredth year of the documented name. Somebody at the kolache table in 2028 will be alive to chair it.

Dates for 2027 and later are firm in intent and will be confirmed as each year is booked.

Vítejte na stránkách Spolku Dobešů. Zápis do rodinného rejstříku je zdarma a otevřený všem, kdo nesou jméno Dobeš v kterékoli podobě, i jejich potomkům. Česky zde.