Genealogy.net’s English version, called GenWiki, can direct you to some of the site’s sources.
I’ve always been interested in maps and geography, and when I began doing genealogy, that affection of mine only grew stronger. Back in predigital days, I used a series of books titled The Atlantic Bridge to Germany (Everton, 1978) with maps and village names for each part of modern Germany in my research. Then I was introduced to Meyer’s Gazetteer of the German Empire (and later cheered when Ancestry.com made it a free item <search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=1074>). And I was wowed when the University of Wisconsin put Ravenstein’s atlas online <uwdc.library.wisc.edu/collections/German/Ravenstein>. I also bought a German road atlas or two. But while all these tools were helpful, nothing compared to a the huge village dictionary called GOV (Genealogische Ortsverzeichnis) and its more than one million entries that were put online by the German site Genealogy.net <www.compgen.de>.
We’ll come back to GOV, but I’ve mentioned it here because it’s one of the prime resources on the German supersite run by the Verein für Computergenealogie e.V. (the Association for Computer Genealogy; the e.V. stands for eingetragener Verein, which translates as “registered association”). One thing that’s difficult when it comes to this massive site: deciding how to refer to it, since the URLs Genealogy.net, Compgen.de, and Genealogienetz.de all link to the default German version of the site. And as if that weren’t enough, the English version of the site goes by GenWiki <wiki-en.genealogy.net>. For our purposes, we’ll simply call the site “Genealogy.net” when talking about the German language features (and any of those three domain names listed earlier) and GenWiki only when referring to the parts translated into English.
As compared to the many-armed “octopus” sites FamilySearch.org <www.familysearch.org> and Ancestry.com <www.ancestry.com>, Genealogy.net is much less centralized. Rather, we can fairly call Genealogy.net a consortium of Web portals that can be challenging to understand, made more difficult by the fact that most of this site’s material appears only in German. But this free site (content is available to all users, but a no-cost registration allows the several additional privileges detailed in this chapter) has so many facets that you’ll want to mine the background information and databases in both languages.
GenWiki touts that its mission is “to become the main source for genealogy in the German-speaking areas of the world.” When all its German-language resources are totaled up, the site has a good claim toward fulfilling its mission, and the English version of the site does have many important features. But unlike most websites that have an English version, the German version doesn’t allow you to click through to get to the English version of the site—you’ll need to use the GenWiki URL listed earlier.
Most folks have heard of Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org, but fewer know the features and uses of Genealogy.net. Here’s a review of all the major parts of GenWiki/Genealogy.net for when you take the site for a test drive. Begin with the English side (unless you’re fluent in German):
Entering wiki-en.genealogy.net/Main_Page in your browser’s URL bar brings you to the English version’s main page (image A.). The site is then sorted into ten portals, some of which are incomplete and others that turn into German immediately upon being clicked. As noted previously, you don’t particularly need to create a login at the get-go and won’t need an account to access the information and databases. Registration is only needed to generate your own content; for example, you need a login to upload a family tree in GEDBAS (profiled later in the German-language section of this chapter) or to edit GenWiki articles.
Genealogy.net’s English version, called GenWiki, can direct you to some of the site’s sources.
If you choose to register for the site, your username will show up on the top right-hand side of the page. The English GenWiki Main Page gives you a menu of ten items and also has several lists on the left-hand side that repeat some of the entries from the menu of portals, plus a list of help features, some of which immediately default to the German language upon being clicked.
The Encyclopedias, Computer genealogy, and Practical help portals are all fairly skeletal on GenWiki, but the Base knowledge portal has an excellent Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), not just for the site but also one that goes into a lot of the basics of German genealogy. In addition, Base knowledge also has English-language descriptions of some of the prime assets that appear on the German side of the site. While other selections from the English-side menu are either blank (Selected Articles) or barely started (Emigration and Miscellaneous), the Regional Research tab is a fertile portal—but it turns into German right away, so we’ll discuss the more robust features of the German side in further detail. You’ll find that Google Translate will truly be your friend on this site, page after page.
The GenWiki/Genealogy.net site provides much the same role for German genealogy societies as the RootsWeb site now owned by Ancestry.com does for American societies; the German megasite provides Web pages for more than thirty associations based in Europe. Most of these societies have a starter page on the English side, but in most cases, you’ll want to go to the German side for more complete information about these organizations.
This portal is the gateway for a number of interesting and useful databases, including a shortcut to look at those with personal name information through the all-at-once Meta Search (image B.). This function searches about a dozen large databases affiliated with the site, including some that we’ll profile in more detail on the German-language side. The caveat with Meta Search is that it only lists results that come back very quickly, so this is a quick-and-dirty search that might need to be repeated with the individual databases. Nevertheless, it’s a good starting point that encompasses searches of the family tree (GEDBAS) and query (FOKO) databases.
Genealogy.net’s Meta Search will comb through all of the site’s databases at once. Its broad scope, however, may result in your missing some records.
The million-place-strong Genealogische Ortsverzeichnis (“genealogical gazetteer,” also known as GOV) is a great go-to item on this site since it is constantly being expanded and includes not just Germany but also other once-German areas of Europe (and, increasingly, some nonGerman localities, too). One of the many reasons to search GOV is that it picks up historical villages that may have been merged out of existence, too.
The German-language start page <www.compgen.de> (image C.) lists the site’s main features; keep this start page active on one window of your computer before feeding the page into Google Translate so you see the feature headings in German, too. The headings are divided into three sections: Informationen (Information), Datenbanken (Databases), and Weitere Angebote (More Offers). Here’s a quick rundown of all the headings, in German (with their English translations as necessary); the more important parts of the portal will be detailed in separate sections.
You’ll find most of Genealogy.net’s resources on the German side of the site. Knowing a bit of German and using translation software like Google Translate will go a long way in aiding your research.
Informationen contains valuable resources to help people make the most of the site and includes the following headings:
When working with in-German-only resources on Genealogy.net, consider the value of learning German genealogy vocabulary by navigating the German-language version side by side with the Google Translate version in English. This will help you more in the long term, as having some basic knowledge of German can only help your research.
Arguably the most important part of the site, Datenbanken connects users to the site’s collections of records and is made up of these headings:
Finally, Weitere Angebote contains some miscellaneous features that German researchers may find helpful when using the site. Its subheadings include:
The Regional Research page <wiki-de.genealogy.net/Portal:Regionale_Forschung> is among the richest features of Genealogy.net. For most every part of Germany, past and present (as well as places in Eastern Europe in which there were German-speaking enclaves), you can find historical articles, help with present-day places, and previous political divisions of the German states and overviews of record groups that are available. The Regional Research page itself is divided into a menu of several choices, the most helpful of which are the Regionale Themenportale (Regional Thematic Portals), which are divided mostly by present-day German states, including Bavaria, Hesse, Prussia, the Palatinate, and Württemberg.
DigiBib, which is an abbreviation for Digitalen Bibliothek (meaning simply “Digital Library”) <wiki-de.genealogy.net/Portal:DigiBib>, has a growing cache of printed material that has been digitized and is being OCR or typed out by volunteers for easier use, although the digitized originals remain accessible, too. Because some of the books have not been made searchable, you might need to just look at titles, then choose the digitized pages to scrutinize for yourself.
Genealogy.net’s version of public family trees is called GEDBAS <gedbas.genealogy.net>. Unlike the type of trees that FamilySearch.org, Ancestry.com, and MyHeritage promote, GEDBAS has no function for directly creating your family tree on the Genealogy.net site. Instead, users are encouraged to upload a GEDCOM file, which is the standard format for family tree information used by many software programs for ease of transfer. Typically, you’ll search this database for an individual’s name (or just a surname), and once you get a hit in a particular family tree, you have the option of showing all persons from that particular file so you can look at the whole tree, and contributors are identified so they can establish contact and exchange search results.
FOKO is a database of names, particularly surnames, that shows how to get more information on that name from an individual or institution. The site contains more than a million and half names represented on FOKO, an average of ten results per surname. Note that FOKO will switch back to German after a few screens, even if you’re in Google Translate. Because of this, you’ll need to call up a separate Google Translate text box and cut-and-paste the German words into it for a translation (though again, as pointed out earlier in this book, these translations aren’t foolproof).
These books are a ticket to research heaven when you find one for the village of your ancestor. You’ll find more details about the clever way these books are organized by the ever-efficient Germans in chapter 9, since databases outside Genealogy.net have collections of these books.
But for now, know that these books are ordinarily compiled by an expert local historian or genealogist who has sorted together all the families found in a particular locality from the beginning of the community’s records. Genealogy.net has extracted several hundred of these books and made them searchable, first by a particular individual’s name, then by showing that person in the context of his or her family.
Genealogy.net has a large collection of digitized and mostly searchable city directories from German cities. The collection contains more than two thousand such volumes, though with multiple annual volumes for many of the cities, the collection represents only a few hundred actual places. Some of this collection overlaps with records that FamilySearch.org has online.
In chapters 2 and 3, you were given your marching orders (gently and perhaps subtly) to learn some German as a way of helping discover the maximum number of German genealogy resources, and hopefully you’ve taken that direction to heart. Genealogy.net is where this comes home to roost since, as you’ve seen in this chapter, the English side of GenWiki has a lot less to offer than the German side. When you travel to Germany in person, the great majority of Germans are friendly and accommodating of Americans who don’t speak any German (though they are friendlier if you know a little and at least try to start the conversation in their language). The vibe on this Internet site, however, is a little different; let’s face it, German speakers have every right to take the attitude, “This is a German website, and anything we give you in English is a bonus.”
When answering a question about enhancements to the English version, a representative of the site responded that “there are certainly plans to expand it in the future, but there is no concrete road map.” Which is another way of saying, “It’s not a priority, so we’ll get to it when we get to it.” It’s important to remember that Genealogy.net and its sister site GenWiki are volunteer efforts, and the wiki format allows anyone with interest to make edits; the site really needs more English-speaking volunteers to take the time to add content. (Once you’ve registered, feel free to go at it!) But despite the “if and when” nature of all things wiki, the bottom line is that this site’s German-language side has exceptional background resources, helpful databases, and good communication tools. All German genealogists wanting a thorough search for their ancestors need to spend time on the site.