Every rung is meant to be easy. Nobody should ever have to leave without somewhere to stand.
The Society is built as three circles, one inside the next. The outer one is free and always will be, because finding the family matters more than funding it. The middle one is where the archive lives. The innermost one exists once, at the founding, and then never again.
Sign it and you are on the map. That is the whole transaction. You get a short letter once a month, you hear about the gatherings before anyone else, and as the Registry fills, you start to learn which branches are near yours.
The consent line, in full. You are asked to agree before anything is kept. The Society stores your entry only to connect the family. It is never published on this site, never sold, never rented, never handed to anyone else. No living person appears in our public pages. Ask us to remove you and we remove you, without asking why. The privacy page says all of this again, slowly.
The sign-up form is being wired now. Until it is live, an email does the identical job. This link opens a message with the questions already written into it.
or just write to [email protected] in your own words
One address, one fee. Spouse and children are included, and there is no upcharge for a large family, which would be a strange thing for a family society to invent. Membership is what pays for the archive to stay online and for the journal to be printed.
Member households also appear, by their own choice, on the member map, which is how a family that scattered across an ocean gets to see itself in one frame again.
Junior membership, for anyone under eighteen, is free with any household. No exceptions and no paperwork. A society that charges children to belong to their own family has misunderstood the assignment.
You do not have to carry the name to care about it. Friends stand on the Registry and receive the monthly letter. The archive is the members' room, and that is the only difference between the two.
Membership opens to everyone on 26 March 2027, the immigrant's 199th birthday.
Fifty-six seats, for the fifty-six of 1656, the year the record begins with the baptism of Jakub Dobeš at Rouchovany. When the fifty-six are taken, the Circle closes and stays closed. There is no second founding.
A Founder is a member for life, with everything in circle two and no renewal to remember, ever. Founders' names stand permanently at dobesh.org/founders, which is a page built to outlive all of us.
Founders' fees are earmarked. They do not go into general operating. They go to three things:
Every dollar of it is reported in the Society's annual report, which is published whether or not anyone asks to see it.
Seats are being offered quietly to the family first, through the founding year. The Circle opens to everyone on 26 March 2027.
Anyone who bears the name in any of its spellings: Dobeš, Dobes, Dobesh, Dobesch, Dobisch, Dobiáš, Dobias. Everyone descended from it, whatever their surname happens to be now, which includes every family the daughters married into. Spouses. And Friends of the Dobešové, who came for the kolaches and stayed.
You do not need a proven pedigree to join anything here. Proof is what we do to records, not to people at the door.
It does not work yet. There is no checkout on this site, because the Society has not opened its membership year and will not take money before it can deliver what the money is for. Write to us using the links above and you will be told exactly when and how, with nothing charged in the meantime.
Zápis do rodinného rejstříku je zdarma. Členství stojí 35 dolarů ročně na domácnost. Zakládající kruh má 56 doživotních míst po 250 dolarech. Napište nám na [email protected].