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Some genealogy researchers use the English "hide" to translate the Czech "lan" for the lack of a better term, However, using hide for lan is not accurate. An English hide can be anywhere from 60 to 120 acres whereas a Czech lan is about 45 acres, sometime more, depending on local usage. I doubt very much that your ancestors had 60 acres of land if they only had half a lan of land.
I can't say how much they paid for the land. It very much depended on the size of the building and the amount of land. Also, they may have inherited it. A small cottage with very little land could fetch anywhere between 400 to 800 gulden (190 – 380 dollars). A bigger building with more land would of course sell for more.
Brzotice was, and still is, a small village and your ancestors most certainly farmed the land. I imagine they grew rye, barley and they may have used a portion of the land as meadow if they had farm animals. Half a lan may have been enough to support a small family but villagers with large families or less land often had to find other jobs as farmhands, day labourers, etc., to get by.
Your ancestors probably sold their small farm to raise enough money to emigrate to America. 170 dollars wasn't that much money for a family of 11 people in 1898. In the mid-1800s people who applied to emigrate from Bohemia had to prove to the authorities that they had at least 140 gulden (about 66 dollars) per person for the journey. One of the reasons many families left illegally was because they couldn't raise the required amount of money. I'm not sure if the same requirements still existed in 1898.
Joseph Rek
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