Given the ubiquity of German-speaking ancestry, virtually any website with genealogical material can have some effect on German family history to some extent. This book has attempted to give a complete rundown of the resources available online that will benefit virtually every genealogist searching for German ancestors. Some topics did not merit complete chapters (or didn’t fit in the categories we’ve discussed so far), so I’ll cover them in this section.
Remember that genealogy is about more than just collecting names and dates. In order to be exposed to more biographical information about your ancestors, you’ll want to consult alternate resources to church and civil registration records. This chapter will dive into some of the best of those resources that are available on the Internet.
Prior to World War I, German-language newspapers were the most prominent foreign-language newspapers in the United States. Some of the top sources for German-language newspapers in the United States are detailed below, along with links to places where you can access newspapers from Germany. Get out your Fraktur reference, because if you are able to find your ancestors in contemporary newspapers, you will undoubtedly learn more about their daily personal and public lives, which can serve to color all of the dates, places, and names that you have uncovered.
GenealogyBank <www.genealogybank.com>, a service of NewsBank dedicated to genealogy research, has many German-language newspapers from Philadelphia as well as the Pennsylvania German areas like Berks and Lancaster counties, along with scattered holdings from other states like Ohio and Illinois, just to name a few. There are also troves of English-language newspapers from German areas in the colonial era.
Chronicling America <chroniclingamerica.loc.gov> is a service of the US Library of Congress, featuring many digitized images of newspapers spanning from the colonial area to around World War I. Many of these images are of German-language text and come from loci of German immigrant settlements. One other highly useful service on the website is the catalog of newspapers from across the country; the database is an amazing reference even if the title you’re looking for is not available online. On each newspaper’s entry, there is a link to known holdings of that title at places like state, local, and university libraries as well as at other types of archives.
This project’s website <www.wessweb.info/index.php/German-Language_Newspaper_Access_in_North_America> serves as a directory for German-language newspaper holdings at various archives across the world. Most of the holdings are not available for online viewing, but if you see a small computer icon with a green arrow over top of it next to the name of the newspaper, you’re in luck: You’ll be able to view digital images of that title online. Some of the online holdings this website links to are contained at the following:
Allgemeine Auswanderungs-Zeitung (General Emigration Newspaper)
When emigration from Germany was at a high point in the mid-1800s, publisher Günther Fröbel sporadically published a newspaper geared towards people who were thinking about or planning on emigrating from Germany, as well as towards people whose relatives had recently emigrated. The newspaper printed passenger lists that are important for genealogy research, and you can view individual issues online spanning from 1846 to 1870 online <zs.thulb.uni-jena.de/receive/jportal_jpjournal_00000025>.
The sources detailed below would be considered secondary sources, so remember to find the primary sources from which they were compiled. Even so, they can be incredibly useful in pointing you in the right direction for finding those original records. They are all databases of names and places or digitized versions of original print materials now made searchable.
Originally begun in 1923 with positive collaborative intentions, this card file came to be used by the Nazi regime to prove or disprove someone’s Aryan descent, which excluded Jewish, African, and East Asian heritage. The Federation of East European Family History Societies (FEEFHS) website <feefhs.org/links/Germany/ahnstamm.html> provides a basic background and history of the card file, and FEEFHS has created traditional A-to-Z indexes of the pedigree files contained within the microfilmed card file. The only way to view the actual pedigree charts, however, is either to visit the Deutsche Zentralstelle für Genealogie (German Genealogical Central Office) in Leipzig or to order individual microfilms from the Family History Library in Utah. Unless you live in Germany, the second option is obviously the way to go. Please note that about 40 percent of the card file focuses on central German families.
GRANDMA (Genealogical Registry and Database of Mennonite Ancestry)’s Window <www.grandmaonline.org/gw-asp-2/login.asp> is a database of Mennonite ancestry, mostly focusing on lines that originated in former Prussian communities in Poland and former Russian communities in Ukraine. You can search the database after registering and paying a one-time twenty-dollar fee. Click the California Mennonite Historical Society link to register.
This website <www.retrobibliothek.de/retrobib/stoebern.html?werkid=100149> has a digitized copy of Meyer’s Encyclopedia, which contains all the entries you would expect from an encyclopedia. Most notably, Meyer’s contains descriptions of individual places and provides some anecdotal information. These descriptions can give you an idea about some of the most prominent aspects of your ancestors’ lives (if, of course, you know their village of origin).
Google Books <books.google.com> has a large collection of digitized German legal newspapers from the nineteenth century. Try searching Intelligenzblatt followed by the name of person you’re looking for. These papers generally detailed the transfer of real estate that occurred when someone was emigrating.
Until World War II and the Holocaust, many Jews lived in Germany and Eastern Europe. Ethnic Germans often have Jewish ancestors, and these Jewish relatives will show up in civil registers (and even sometimes in Christian church registers when a state church compelled Jews to be recorded there). It’s also worth noting that the use of surnames by Jews generally only started when decreed by laws. Here are some websites that provide information about German Jews.
The JewishGen site <www.jewishgen.org/gersig> has a master list of sorts of websites and databases pertaining to Jews, including those in Germany. In addition to an Internet discussion group for exchange of information about German Jewish genealogy, the site offers many helpful maps, a listing of Jewish newspapers in the German language, and a grid showing when Jews were legally required to take “civil names” (surnames).
This website <www.uni-heidelberg.de/institute/sonst/aj/FRIEDHOF/ALLGEM/index.html>, created by the Zentralarchiv zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland (Central Archive for the Research of the History of the Jewish People in Germany) and hosted by the University of Heidelberg website, focuses particularly on the inscriptions of tombstones in Jewish cemeteries across Germany, which can provide very useful information. If you have Jewish ancestors from Germany, this can be a good place to look for names and dates prior to emigration.
The International Tracing Service holds many documents concerning victims of the Nazi regime during the Holocaust at an online repository <www.its-arolsen.org/en/homepage/index.html>. The archive contains information about individual prisoners at the extermination and concentration camps, and also has some higher-level documents detailing the operation of one of the most murderous governments the world has ever known. Jewish research in the early- and mid-1900s will likely benefit the most from this research, but the archive also contains information about some of the other populations that were subjugated by the Nazis.
In addition to the many websites this book has investigated for their usefulness in setting a foundation for your research, attachment to one or more of the megasites, or applicability to a common genealogical question, still more unique resources can help German researchers. Whether it’s the private certificates that are the hallmark of the Earnest Archives and Library or companies offering DNA testing, your trip through the German online world is not yet complete until you’ve looked at the rest of these sites.
The Earnest Archives and Library <www.earnestarchivesandlibrary.com/index.php> is “devoted to research of Pennsylvania German genealogy recorded on Fraktur, broadsides, family registers, Bible records, official documents, and ephemera.” While it has a relatively narrow focus, the library houses an index of more than thirty thousand Fraktur documents, and if your ancestors lived in the main Pennsylvania German areas, the library may have information about them in its index. The people who run the library have published many books about Fraktur, most of them focusing on one particular family name.
Likewise, the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center has a guide <www.genealogycenter.org/pathfinders/guides/German.aspx> that provides a great way to equip you with a list of the most prominent sources for doing German genealogy research.
Ahnenforschung.net <ahnenforschung.net> is another good starting point for German family history research. Try searching a family name or place name from the main page, which will take you to a list of relevant forum discussions (mostly in German).
Given the historically tumultuous political climate in Europe, war likely played an important part in your ancestors’ lives, and records from their service can provide important information for your research. The Johannes Schwalm Historical Association <www.jsha.org> is dedicated to the history of the soldiers from Hessen that were hired by the British Crown to help them put down the revolution in the American colonies, a conflict known now as the Revolutionary War. The website lists fully and partially researched soldiers, so give it a browse if you feel that your ancestor may have come to the United States in this way.
For researchers looking for their ancestors in more modern conflicts, the Volksbund Kriegsgräberstätten <www.volksbund.de/graebersuche.html> allows you to search for German soldiers who were killed in World War I or World War II. Specifically, this group began as a preserver of German military cemeteries and has been doing so since 1919.
Many of your genealogical brick walls can be busted by using DNA testing. FamilyTreeDNA <www.familytreedna.com> is specifically mentioned here because of the Y-DNA tests that it offers. Without getting too scientific, the Y-chromosome is passed from father to son, and, in most cases, is completely unaltered (though over the course of time, mutations occur—otherwise, all men on the planet would have the same Y-chromosome). This is useful for genealogy because it can prove that two men directly descend from the same common ancestor even if records are not available to show it. If you are having trouble getting past an ancestor on your direct male-line ancestry, consider being tested (if you’re a man) or having a male member of your immediate family (i.e., father or brother) tested. Your results will be placed in a large database for comparison to other people who have been tested.
Two other types of DNA testing, called autosomal and mitochondrial tests are available through FamilyTreeDNA as well as other vendors such as AncestryDNA <dna.ancestry.com> and 23andMe <www.23andme.com>. The autosomal test is perhaps the most comprehensive of the three. This tests the reshuffled DNA from both mother and father and, when results are compared to another person’s, can estimate the closeness of relationship based on the amount of DNA in common. In contrast, the mitochondrial test (“mtDNA” for short) examines mitochondrial DNA, which is handed down (usually intact) from a mother to her children (male and female) but only passed on further by females; therefore, going back in time, it traces the so-called “umbilical line” of your mother, your mother’s mother, your mother’s mother’s mother, etc. This will help you identify potential maternal ancestors and current relatives, but can’t fill in other research gaps.
While these resources may be a bit more “out there,” you might find that they solve some of your research questions when other, more reliable sources fail: