Just five years ago, devoting an entire book to online sources for genealogists with German-speaking ancestors wouldn’t have been a particularly fulfilling exercise. Relatively few genealogical problems could be solved “beginning to end” on either German- or American-based websites.
But oh, what a difference those five years have made. Whether it’s the “big kahunas” of the online genealogy world, such as FamilySearch.org <www.familysearch.org> and Ancestry.com <www.ancestry.com>, adding more German content, the digitization of church registers that play such an important role for this ethnic group, or any of the other solutions the Web has provided to the myriad genealogy questions that arise—the availability of Internet sources for German research has come of age.
You’ve no doubt already heard that more people in America claim German ancestry than they do any other ethnic heritage. What that means in practical terms is that more digitized records, more databases, and more how-to guides exist for German ancestry than for any other ethnicity. Add that to the fact that Germans have been scrupulously keeping some types of records for centuries, and you have a recipe for success. The Internet is full of resources for those researching German ancestry, and we’ll cover many of them in this book.
The scope of Trace Your German Roots Online includes both American and European websites, and there’s a good reason for this: In many—if not most—cases, you haven’t been handed an ancestral line all the way back into Europe. Even if you know the name of an immigrant ancestor, you may not know the immigrant’s village of origin, which is crucial for further research. And even if you’ve found a name for the village of origin in an American record, it’s likely to have been garbled in some way that makes further research impossible until you’ve unraveled it. Records generated in America are often the ticket to working through this process.
In addition, this book aims to help family history researchers who are seeking German-speaking ancestors (pre- and post-immigration) through websites with records and information from both sides of the Atlantic. That identifier is a bit too lengthy to keep using throughout, so instead, let’s resolve now that phrases such as German researchers, German genealogy, and German genealogical sources apply to this group.
Whether these most common of queries—such as finding the name of the village of origin, then finding its “real,” native name—or one of the many that follow, questions can best be solved by observing how you frame them. And for that reason, this book uses the questions most applicable to German genealogists as jumping-off points for many of its chapters. As you’ll see, after you get your feet wet in part 1 with the basics of German genealogy, part 2 lists the top websites that virtually every researcher will need, and these sites will help answer many of those questions. Then part 3 will cover more focused, niche sites to help you answer single, specialized questions.
In addition to the sites we’ll be profiling, every genealogist should know about several essential websites, including Cyndi’s List <www.cyndislist.com>, a categorized directory of genealogy-related websites; Find A Grave <www.findagrave.com>, which has loads of tombstone photos and other death records; and One-Step Webpages by Stephen P. Morse <www.stevemorse.org>, which contains better ways to search various databases than the actual sites.
People start doing genealogy in many ways and for many reasons, but successful family historians usually follow the same general practices. While other resources will dive into more detail about these strategies, this section will give you an overview of some general genealogical research strategies that you’ll likely find helpful.
Especially when wanting to connect their ancestry with a famous person, many people are tempted to just look for a family pedigree (either in old-fashioned book form or as one of the burgeoning collaborative Internet trees—more on these in chapter 2) to see if they match up with that family. Resist that temptation, because it’s usually a waste of time. Better, instead, to work backward in time—from the known to unknown—by starting with whatever documents, photos, and writings you have in your family, then interviewing relatives to find out more as you go back.
Knowing where your information comes from and how reliable it is forms the bedrock of any good research. Regardless of where you’re searching, you’ll want to learn to cite sources so others can understand how you arrive at your conclusions about identities, dates, and relationships, if and when you share your findings (and you will understand your own methodology when you later review your earlier work). Part of this attention to sources involves an appreciation for the different tiers of research.
In the past decade, the professional genealogy world, led by the Board for Certification of Genealogists (BCG) <www.bcgcertification.org>, has put forth a sophisticated method for evaluating resources. Under these guidelines, sources are either original or derivative, and the information shown in them is either primary or secondary. The resulting evidence stemming from that information is then either direct or indirect. An excellent explanation of these terms appears in the article “Skillbuilding: Guidelines for Evaluating Genealogical Resources” on the BCG website <www.bcgcertification.org/skillbuilders/skbld085.html>.
The time in which your ancestor lived and the place or places where he resided are like a set of crosshairs that help determine what types of records you have the potential to find. Learning the history of your ancestor’s residences enables you to avoid pitfalls related to changes in governmental boundaries, which have an impact on where you’ll find documents ranging from wills to deeds to tax records. Where your ancestors lived also determines what records were even kept for a particular time period.
Yes, of course your direct-line ancestors are the most interesting to you. But branching out to research your direct ancestors’ siblings will help you learn more about those direct-line ancestors. For instance, your ancestor’s death certificate might have only slashes for her mother’s name, but the certificates of her siblings may name her.
Keep track of your genealogy with pedigree charts (showing your direct line back from parents to grandparents to great-grandparents, etc.) and family group sheets (listing a couple and their children). Genealogy software programs automate this process. Another tool for presenting your information—which, again, software will generate—is the German-originated Ahnentafel (literally, “ancestor table”), a compact way of showing all your ancestors. In this scheme, you (or whatever person closest in time you’re starting with—say, your child) are No. 1, your father is No. 2, and your mother is No. 3. Then each preceding generation follows, with the father’s number being double that of the child’s and the mother’s being “double plus one” of the child’s.
A common theme of research is that you’ll need to learn about the country you’re researching in, and that definitely applies here. No study of how to research German genealogy would be complete without a crash course in German history and culture. This section will briefly discuss the historical and political divisions of Germany as well as which religious denominations were prevalent in German culture and how they shaped its history. In addition to providing more insight into your ancestors’ lives, this information will help you track down civil and church records in your research.
Today’s Federal Republic of Germany (Bundesrepublik Deutschland) is a union of sixteen Länder (the plural of Land, the German equivalent of an American state), a fair number of which have no historical significance since they do not predate World War II. The Länder are made up of districts or Kreise (singular: Kreis), which are more or less the same level of government as American counties. Significant municipal mergers in the 1960s and 1970s in Germany resulted in some newly created village names. For example, Hachenbach and Niedereisenbach, two historically separate villages on either side of the Glan River, were combined as Glanbrücken, a name not previously used.
Loads of mostly tiny German states existed for hundreds of years. Even though the number of these states was drastically reduced in the European reorganization after Napoleon Bonaparte’s defeat in 1815, many people today still retain regional affinities. More important, you must think of a village’s political allegiance both historically and in modern times to determine where to find all relevant records. For example, the university city of Heidelberg was the off-and-on capital of the Electoral Palatinate for centuries. In the nineteenth century, it became part of Baden, which is now part of the Land Baden-Württemberg. You will find records relating to Heidelberg, therefore, at archives in both the Palatinate (now part of the Land Rhineland-Palatinate) and Baden.
The upshot of this anything-but-linear division, redivision, and amalgamation of political units is that you need to always challenge your assumptions about where you might find records relating to your ancestor—and as a consequence, which repositories’ websites will have the relevant information. For better or worse, we’ll give you even more detail how to figure this out in chapter 9.
Here’s a short comparison: In the United States, we have a whole Baskin-Robbins store of religious flavors, while in Germany, you’ve pretty much got vanilla and chocolate.
OK, it’s not quite that simple—once Germans hit America, they become part of that kaleidoscope of religious freedom that has resulted in a plethora of Christian denominations, but that religious diversity was not always as significant in the old country. Let’s start with the simplicity of Germany today and work backward to the complications.
Today in Germany, most of the churches where your ancestors worshipped are either Roman Catholic (Katholisch) or Protestant (Evangelisch which translates poorly into English as “Evangelical,” although this group of believers has nothing to do with American Evangelicalism political activism or theology). As they do around the world, Roman Catholic churches in Germany recognized the spiritual authority of the Pope. Individual churches belong to parishes (Gemeinden), which are part of dioceses and archdioceses.
Evangelisch congregations belong to state church associations, some of which follow borders of states dating back to the Second German Empire. These associations are part of a national body called the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland, or EKD. The Evangelisch church was created in the early 1800s as a forced union of what were then the two largest Protestant groups, the Lutherans and the Reformed. Both of these groups were created during the Protestant Reformation of the 1500s and were the established churches in various German states at various times. As a result, it’s likely that German churches that are now Evangelisch will be referred to as Lutheran (Lutherisch) or Reformed (Reformiert) in historical records. In addition, a given village might have had both a Reformed and Lutheran congregation, resulting in two sets of concurrent registers being kept. However, a small minority of congregations resisted the merger and are known as “Old Lutherans.”
A few other Protestant minority groups existed, such as Mennonites, the Amish, members of the Church of the Brethren, and Moravians. But because the only state churches endorsed by the various rulers were Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed, most of these smaller groups headed for America, which is where the Germans became part of that aforementioned kaleidoscope.
While most Germans came to America as either mainstream Protestant (Lutheran or Reformed in Colonial times, Protestant later) or Catholic, the seeds of sectarian minority groups reached full flower when Germans settled in areas that stayed overwhelmingly German. This resulted in immigrants joining other Protestant denominations: Presbyterians, Methodists, and Episcopalians.
In Germany, church registers may be in either the original church or religious archives; many have been microfilmed and now digitized, and these will be profiled in chapters on the major genealogy websites as well as chapter 10. In America, where ethnic Germans adhered to a variety of different faiths, the information covered by surviving religious records (if you can find them) vary greatly. You’ll find information on digitized American church records on major genealogy websites within those websites’ respective chapters.
While we’ve looked at general genealogy principles and some background information on German history and culture, we’ve yet to put the two together. While German genealogy shares research basics with other ethnic groups, some circumstances set German research apart and will add complications to your work. This section introduces some key steps involved in German genealogy; the methodologies and caveats outlined here are covered in more detail in The Family Tree German Genealogy Guide (Family Tree Books, 2014) <www.shopfamilytree.com/the-family-tree-german-genealogy-guide-u4833>.
Many researchers mistakenly assume that the same strategies you use and records you look for when researching ancestors in America also apply to the Old World, but this isn’t always the case. Because modern Germany developed differently from the United States, you’ll have to challenge certain assumptions about genealogy research if you want to be successful. For example, you likely won’t find the German tombstones of your relatives (a great resource for stateside researchers), as limited burial space forced religious institutions in Germany to reuse burial plots and remove memorial stones. Some more key things to consider when comparing US and German research are detailed below.
I’ll point out several times in several ways that if your major goal is getting your German immigrant ancestor across the Atlantic, you need to know the name of the village of origin, called the Heimat (“home” or “motherland”) in German. That’s because Germany has a history of decentralization. As detailed earlier in this chapter, throughout the Middle Ages and into early modern times, German-speaking areas consisted of many small states—more than a thousand for a good chunk of history!—that at times bore only a passing allegiance to what was called the “Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.” Villages were often bought and sold or inherited by different minor dynasties as others went extinct. The Second German Empire (1871–1918) was the first state resembling Germany as we think of it today, even though it was technically a federal union consisting of a couple dozen states (with Prussia dominating as by far the largest).
As a result, Germany has no truly “national” archives and lacks a broad, uniformly kept federal record group like the US census (indeed, only a few individual German state censuses have been preserved with genealogically useful information). As a researcher, you must also keep track of which noble jurisdiction ruled a particular village during the time period you’re researching, because this may have an impact on what archives have custody of the records you need.
While the American story of Manifest Destiny was of a nation that expanded its boundaries and tamed a frontier, Germany’s narrative has been one of expansion and then contraction as a result of losing both world wars in the twentieth century. Among the crucial factors to affect this narrative are a history of disunity mentioned earlier, the many German-speaking enclaves that formed from the Middle Ages onward throughout eastern Europe, and the growth of the Prussian state in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The upshot is that there’s a good chance one or more of your German ancestors comes from an area outside of today’s Germany—and might be outside of any configuration of Germany ever. As part of tackling place names in chapter 3, we’ll give you some online resources for dealing with these challenges.
Keep notes about anything helpful you see on the Internet, indicating where you found it (e.g., a hyperlink) and what you found there. This will help you avoid the sorry refrain of “Where did I find that?”
The immigration generation is a teeter-totter of sorts. For a majority of individuals, emigration from Germany to America was a one-way ticket that resulted in records only in Europe before immigration and only in America after. And since those American records may be more accessible to you in many cases, your first task is trying to find every such document directly about (or mentioning) the ancestor you believe to be an immigrant.
Among the most the common records to show either a village of origin or at least a particular German state are
Looking for pieces of information such as occupations or unusual given names that might distinguish your immigrant will help you along the way. You also may need to use what eminent genealogist Elizabeth Shown Mills calls the FAN club of “friends, associates, and neighbors” as proxies in your research. Since so many Germans came as part of clusters (several families from the same village on a particular ship) or chains (people from the same village following each other over a span of years), identifying who your ancestors associated with in America—then researching those associates to find their origins—may lead to the same village.
A lot of the records you will encounter—in both America and Germany—are written in the German language, but don’t let this defeat you. Many online transcription and translation aids will be detailed in chapters 2 and 3. Right now, you just need to be prepared for the fact that you won’t always be spoon-fed records in your native language. (Unless that language is German, of course.)
One word you’ll need to know is Rufnamen. If you’re just starting out—especially if you’re looking at a lot of records that have been translated some time ago—you’re going to think, “My, there are an awful lot of men named John.” This is because most areas of Germany used a double naming (and, in the nineteenth century, sometimes a triple naming) system in which the individual was baptized with two or three given names but then was called by only one (hence the word Rufname, literally “call name”; plural: Rufnamen).
Until the 1800s, the first name Johann or Hans was given to virtually all German boys, and Anna or Maria to girls. Each person’s middle name was the Rufname. In the nineteenth century, it become more complicated because children were often given three names and may use any of three as their Rufname in records.
So, armed now with more knowledge about what you’ll need as a German genealogist, we come back to what was mentioned in passing: the importance of framing your questions. You need goals—which some call a “research plan”—in order to formulate those questions. As Dave McDonald, author of the Thinking Genealogically blog <onwresearch.thinkinggenealogically.com> has written, family historians should ask, “What do I want to learn, and about whom or what?”
Framing a question too generally will likely result in blundering around the Internet, and that can also waste a lot of your time going down proverbial rabbit holes that don’t yield genealogically useful information. On the other hand, framing a question too specifically may produce no results, and data may go by the wayside. This book is designed to give you appropriate focus in your website searches—running you through the most effective ways to use the Internet for German genealogy.
Getting the right answers is all about asking the right questions, what we’ve called “framing” questions in this chapter. To make the most of your time (and get the most out of your work), ask yourself the following questions before you begin a research session. You can download a Word-document version of this worksheet at <ftu.familytreemagazine.com/trace-your-german-roots-online>.
The best genealogy research is methodical and goal oriented to maximize research time.
EXAMPLE: Rather than simply browsing Ancestry.com for your surname, you want to find your immigrant ancestor. Family legend states that he came from your maternal grandmother’s side.
My objective
What pieces of information (date or place of birth/marriage/death, names of children, maiden name, etc.) are you missing? Remember your basic genealogy concepts—namely, go from the known to the unknown—and put them into practice by critically examining what information you have about that ancestor or ancestors.
EXAMPLE: You “know” when your maternal grandmother died because you’ve never forgotten that date—but you should get a copy of her death certificate anyway, because that way the date is not subject to memory’s tricks. Plus, the death certificate may have additional information about her that you never knew or don’t recall.
Known facts related to my research goal
What does your current knowledge of ancestors tell you about the generation before? What can you learn about these ancestors, and what resources do you need to find to do so?
EXAMPLE: Your grandmother’s death certificate lists her parents’ names along with their states of birth. Your next step will likely be finding their birth information: Were there birth certificates in that state during the time period they were likely born? If not, what other sorts of records might exist that would give birth information, such as baptisms or newspaper listings or their tombstones?
My next steps
During each step of the research process, revisit your questions and assumptions, reacting to what you find (or don’t find) as a result of research on those questions. Then reformulate your questions.