What we are for, how we prove things, what we will never publish, and who is answerable for it.
The Dobesh Society gathers everyone who bears or descends from the name Dobeš, in every spelling it has ever taken, anywhere in the world. We find the family, we prove and preserve its records to a documented standard, we publish what is proven, we protect the privacy of the living without exception, and we bring the family together in person: at the festival tent, at Dobešfest, and in 2028 at Rouchovany, where the register begins.
The Society is designed to outlive the person who founded it. That is not modesty, it is the central engineering requirement, and most of the odd-looking decisions on this page exist because of it.
Bearers of the name in any spelling: Dobeš, Dobes, Dobesh, Dobesch, Dobisch, Dobiáš, Dobias. All descendants of the name regardless of what surname they carry today, which deliberately includes every line that runs through a daughter. Spouses. And Friends of the Dobešové, who are welcome without qualification.
Membership requires no proven pedigree. We apply the proof standard to records, not to people who knock on the door.
Family history is full of confident sentences with nothing underneath them. Ours are marked, so you can always see how much weight a sentence will carry. Every claim in the archive wears one of four marks.
Nothing enters our archive unproven. In practice that means nothing enters unmarked and uncited. A claim with no mark on it is not a claim, it is a rumor, and rumors go in the stories column where they are labeled as stories and enjoyed as stories.
Family memory is not the enemy of the record. It is the other witness. When the two disagree, the record decides, and the memory is kept anyway, because the memory is why anyone went looking.
The promise. No living person's name, date, address, or photograph appears in any public page of this site or in any public Society publication. The only exceptions are the founder, who is named because someone must be answerable, and public figures written about strictly in their public capacity, such as an athlete on a professional roster.
Registry entries are private data, not content. They are used to connect the family and for nothing else. They are never published, never sold, never rented, never traded, and never handed to a third party. Anyone may ask to be removed and will be removed, promptly and without being asked to justify it.
This is written into the charter as constitutional law, not as a policy that a future officer can quietly revise. The full text is on the privacy page.
Genealogy has a bad habit of treating living relatives as data. The dead are our subject. The living are our members, and there is a difference.
The Society researches archive-first, reading original records in their original hands, including Czech, Moravian, and German parish registers, and holds every conclusion to the standard above before it is published. Where artificial intelligence helps, it is used the way a good research assistant is used: to read, to transcribe, to index, to draft, and never to decide what is true.
Built with AI assistance under the Society's provenance rules: nothing invented, everything cited.
The same rule governs Ask Tobiáš, the family historian available to members. He answers from the archive and cites what he says. He declines when he does not know. He will not speculate about living people, and he cannot be talked into it.
Today the Society has one officer: a founder and steward, Daniel Dobesh, of Colorado. We say that plainly rather than describe a board that does not exist. A society that begins with a decorative masthead has begun by fibbing, and everything after that is harder.
As the family gathers, officers are elected and the critical functions are doubled: two people for the archive, two for the site, two for the money, starting in the first year that two willing people exist for each. The most thoroughly documented cause of death for a family society is the death or exhaustion of its founder, and the design against it is written in from the beginning.
The charter is published in full and stays published. It carries the proof standard and the privacy of the living as constitutional law, offices with fixed terms and named succession, a related-party policy, an amendment clause, a rule requiring a deliberate review of platform and formats every five years, and a wind-up clause naming who inherits the archive if the Society ever ends. A Colorado nonprofit filing and a 501(c)(3) application follow the public launch, and an annual report is published every year from the first one, however small that first one is.
The Society's founder and steward, Daniel Dobesh, also owns Anne & Joachim Heritage Press LLC, the publishing partner that researches and prints the family's books, and we state that here rather than let a member discover it later; the charter carries a related-party policy governing any arrangement between the two, and any money that moves between them appears in the annual report.
Two separate things: the Press is a business that sells books, the Society is a family association that welcomes relatives. They share a founder, a research standard, and a stubbornness about citations. They do not share a bank account.
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Colophon. This site is a small set of hand-written HTML files. There are no trackers, no cookies, no analytics, no advertising, and no fonts or images loaded from anywhere else. Every page works offline and will still work in twenty years, which is the only web technology decision a hundred-year society should be making. Built with AI assistance under the Society's provenance rules: nothing invented, everything cited.
Nic nevstoupí do našeho archivu bez důkazu. Údaje o žijících osobách nikdy nezveřejňujeme. Česky zde.