German genealogical research

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German genealogical research

• Central New York
• Genealogical Society
• Dewitt, NY
• April 2008

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Introduction

• Establishment of the country - As a modern
  nation-state, the country was first unified
  amidst the Franco-Prussian War in 1871- preceded
  by hundreds of minor states, each with their own
  records.
• Emigration - several periods - colonial to
  America (Palatines) after wars etc
• Records remaining - emigration lists at ports in
  archives permissions to leave books compiled by
  Germans today filmed parish records.

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German immigration in the 19th century to the US
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• Almost 25 per cent of the US claims some Germanic
  ancestry. In the 1990 US census, about 60 million
  people did so.

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• The key thing to keep in mind is that while
  Germans are very good record keepers, these
  records were designed for administrative
  purposes, not genealogical. You need to find the
  exact town of origin in Germany (or Austria, the
  Banat, or other German speaking areas such as
  western Poland) in order to continue research
  overseas.

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Where do you look?

• These are most often at the local level. But
  where do you find this out?
• Learning this information (your ancestors home
  town) is usually accomplished by researching the
  first person in your family to come to North
  America from a German state. Records in the U.S.
  or Canada may name the home parish.
• The second challenge is accessing the registers.
  This is often done overseas by ordering films
  from the GSU. American church records are also
  available through that system
• Churches are in the church business, not
  genealogy.

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• The most popular source of records in Germany is
  parish registers. Unlike the US, most Germans
  belong to some church and records can be found
  for them, sometimes going back to the early
  1500s. And, church records here in the US can
  often point the way to the German town of origin.
  That may appear in the marriages entries or even
  the death entries a few years or even 50 or 60
  years after immigration.

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Sprechen Sie deutsch?

• Reading them can be a challenge - they are
  handwritten, most do NOT have indexes, and even
  pagination is sketchy. They may be chronological,
  or not. Most often people use films made by the
  GSU, and these can be filmed in quaint and
  curious ways.

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Other ideas

• You will want to check naturalization records,
  passenger arrival lists, marriages, court cases,
  military enlistments and pensions, domestic
  church registers, obituaries, and a host of other
  records, including family sources, to find this
  information. There is NOT one master index to all
  German records regardless of what commercial
  databases would have you believe

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Baptisms (Taufregister) orGeburt Register

• These are usually done within a day or two of the
  birth. However, birth certificates as we know
  them today in the US do not exist for the most
  part, even tough the records may go back to the
  1500s. But sometimes they will have the fifth
  child, third son which helps build a family
  group. They tend to give all parties to the event
  - parents, the child, witnesses, godparents, etc.

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Sample birth
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Another sample
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Marriages (Heirath, Kopulations) or Verbindung
Register

• are very helpful - they give the bride and
  groom, their parents, and whether those parents
  or living or dead (hinterlassen or gestorben)
  what the man does for a job whether this is the
  first marriage or not and if a widow or widower.
  Of course, they include the date and place.

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marriages
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Death registers (Gestorbene)

• These give the date of death, and often the age.
  They do not often give cause of death or where -
  unless the person died far away and was brought
  back for burial. Remember, that embalming was
  usually not done back then.
• Not the least, graves are often leased for a
  while, and then the grave is dug up and reused.
  It is not usual to find cemeteries with stones
  for regular people going back more than 75 years
  or so.

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(No Transcript)
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A sobering commentary

• Perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind
  while searching for death records is that many of
  our ancestors died young. One writer around the
  end of the eighteenth century concluded that only
  seventy-eight out of one thousand people would
  die old of age. The rest would die before their
  time and by chance. In Germany, for example, the
  average life expectancy remained below thirty
  well into the 1800s. You will find many of your
  ancestors death records within a few years of
  their birth. High infant mortality rates plagued
  communities throughout Europe until the beginning
  of the twentieth century. Even in the middle of
  the 1800s, a quarter of all babies born in many
  European countries died before their first
  birthday. At the start of the nineteenth century
  in France, less than one half of children lived
  to be ten years old.
• Another group hit hard by death was women who
  were bearing children. Childbirth presented
  serious hazards to both the mother and child. In
  the mid 1700s, there were about 1,000 to 1,200
  maternal deaths per 100,000 births. Given that
  the average woman had about five or six children,
  the cumulative probability of dying during
  childbirth came to between five and ten percent
• Written by Leslie Huber.

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But of course that would be too easy if it were
all easily arranged and described.
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Sample emigration permit
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Where did the ancestors come from?

• Start by using US sources, unless you know for
  sure from a reliable source
• Examples censuses, death records, passenger
  lists, naturalization records, marriage records.
• Beware of misspellings -

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Ellis Island can be wrong
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Info from Wikipedia

• Many of these were supposed to be Novi Vrbas or
  Neu Werbass
• Vrbas (?????) is a city and municipality located
  in Serbia at 45.57 N 19.65 E, in the South
  Backa District in the province of Vojvodina.

Neu-Werbass was a German Settlement 1785-1945
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• Many of those variations refers to Neu Werbass in
  the Banat.
• Orrosphee was Oberosphe, and Belgental was
  Boelgenthal
• Bladen was in Silesia and appears in the FHC
  catalog as Germany, Preussen, Schlesien, Bladen
  and also as Wlodzienin, Opole, Poland!
• Alsatian records have the same thing they
  bounced back and forth between France and
  Germany, and so do the languages unless they
  were Catholic, where the records could be in
  Latin

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Use Internet resources, web sites, Ancestry.com
and others, reference books such as Meyers

• Meyers Orts- und Verkehrs-Lexikon des Deutschen
  Reichs / with researcher's guide and translations
  of the introduction, instruction for the use of
  the gazetteer, and abbreviations by Raymond S.
  Wright III.
• Publisher Baltimore, MD Genealogical Pub.,
  2000.

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Things to remember

• Identify key words and phrases
• Read the records
• Note calendars changes and naming conventions

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• Transcribe or copy records (upcoming new
  Familysearch)
• Translate from German to English, online at
  Altavista or through Google

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The who what where why of records

• Who created them -what jurisdictions
• What types of docs are available
• Where are they kept today - Bruhl v. Rudolstadt.
• When were they created
• Why they should be used.

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Things that can be used here and there -

• Accessing records
• Church records
• Civil registrations esp in Alsace.
• Census?
• Court records, here and there.

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Common places to use

• Family history centers
• Internet
• US records
• Peripheral research

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• Message boards
• County and local histories
• Military records in US
• Alien registrations and naturalizations

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• Histories of settlement Palatines or as recent
  as 1900.
• newspapers

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• Locating archives in Germany
• Doing research there
• Schools and universities - here or there
• Guild and occupational - my be in the Rathaus
• Der Schlussel -