The state archives in Baden-Württemberg hosts a database of more than 250,000 emigrants.
The late Arta F. Johnson, a linguistics professor who also wrote and lectured on German genealogy, had a knack for illustrating her presentations with some of the most showstopping anecdotes. One time, she was talking about how crucial language skills and historical background were to finding the German village of origin. Johnson said a woman had come up to her at a conference, somewhat breathless, and said that her ancestor’s Heimat was written on his tombstone as Groβherzogtum, Baden, showing her a photo of the tombstone as evidence. “But never in twenty years of searching have I been able to find the village of Groβherzogtum on any map of Baden. Can you help me?” she asked. Johnson replied that indeed she could. “You see,” Johnson recounted telling the woman, “there’s no comma between the words, and Groβherzogtum means ‘grand duchy,’ referring to the ‘Grand duchy of Baden,’ a political unit at the time.” Johnson reported that the woman slinked sheepishly away.
The woman’s confusion in Johnson’s story is not unusual, and as you work your way into more specialized sites, you need to have your wits about you in determining what areas those sites are talking about. The upshot is that you need to challenge your assumptions about where you will find records from your ancestors’ villages as well as how to work with the information you have available—a region of origin or a port of embarkation, for example. In this chapter, we’ll discuss some strategies and resources you can use when taking this important step in your research.
Throughout the book, we’ve been harping on Germany’s history of decentralized records that goes along with its fractured political history. But this repetition is necessary for you to avoid the fate of many novice researchers who go into a search with blinders on and therefore may fail to see many of the records relating to their families.
In America, we’re used to a linear formation of new political units—unsettled land became territories, those territories became states, the states were divided into counties, and the counties often were further divided into municipalities (like towns, townships, cities, and/or boroughs, depending on the particular state) as their populations grew.
But in the German states, the evolution of political units was rarely linear. For example, a duchy (ruled by a duke) could be divided into three parts so each son could have a share. Later, one son’s dynastic line dies out, and his family divvies up his share amongst descendants of the other two lines. But then some towns in one part of the duchy are co-owned by a Catholic archbishop’s state, and one of the co-owners buys out the other. During the early 1800s, a “mediatization” process granted church officials’ holdings to the nearest secular state. Finally, during Prussia’s ascent into German preeminence, the formerly independent state (along with its villages) became a province of the Prussian kingdom.
Why delve into this complexity? Because which noble jurisdiction owned a village during a particular time period will affect in which local, regional, state, and religious archives the village’s records will be found today. Essentially, you need to always “think in triplicate”—to coin a German phrase, denken dreimal—when looking to place your immigrant’s village in the context of the overall German map. You’ll need to keep three key time periods in mind when plotting out when and where your ancestors lived:
Chapter 5 of The Family Tree German Genealogy Guide (Family Tree Books, 2013) contains a full listing of current and historical names of German government divisions. The local civil registration office known as a Standesamt houses the birth, marriage, and death records unless these records have been passed on to an archive. While this was mandated by a new German law several years ago, often these documents are still held at the village level back to the point they were initiated.
For a number of reasons, finding that your German ancestor’s village has an Ortssippenbuch (a publication also sometimes called an Ortsfamilienbuch) is like finding a gold mine. 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 (the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries or, in some cases, as early as the fifteenth century) to either the present day or a relatively recent cutoff date.
Generally, these books are organized as follows: The surnames in the locality are alphabetized, and families with the same surname are listed chronologically by marriage date, along with birth, marriage, and death places and dates. This information, along with any other finds (e.g., occupation), comes from church books, civil registration records, and court, tax, and land documents. Some of the books even cross-reference families in other Ortssippenbücher.
Each family group in the book is given a number (starting with the first alphabetized family), and if any of the family’s children’s marriages are known, those children are given their own family numbers—you just have to go to that number to continue the line. Likewise, the father and mother in a family listing will include their fathers’ family numbers so you can continue a line backward in time. The family listings make heavy use of abbreviations and symbols to give the maximum amount of information in the minimum amount of space; for example, preceding the dates of vital information: an asterisk (*) is used instead of “born”; a double o linked together means “marriage”; and a cross indicates “death.” Most of these books were published in the decades after World War II, in some cases as a way of using the immense amount of data that the Nazi Party had required from people to prove their Aryan origins. As a result, their typeface is usually easy to read.
As noted in the chapter 4, FamilySearch.org has some German civil registrations in its microfilmed and digital collections that are worth checking out. However, FamilySearch.org’s collections do not contain all of these valuable resources. To find records that are not currently digitized, you can e-mail the Standesamt if you know the particular date of a birth, marriage, or death event. Note that access to these records is restricted for a certain number of years due to German privacy laws, which differ depending on the event: 110 years for births, 80 years for marriages, and 30 years for deaths.
Please note that these books are secondary sources and the information you find in them should be verified with the original records wherever possible—even experts can make mistakes! Also, carefully examine the books’ structure; some of the volumes contain multiple villages (all part of one church parish, for instance) and separate out the families by village in the volume. Other books were designed primarily for the village’s local population and eliminated entries for people who were not represented by a current descendant in the village. The German areas in which the most of these books have been published are Rhineland-Palatinate, Hesse, Baden, Württemberg, Ostfriesland, Saarland, and Waldeck.
Volumes called Dorfbücher sometimes list lines of descent within families or houses, but concentrate more on the history of the village as a whole. Since the history of many German villages stretches back eight hundred to one thousand years, these Dorfbücher are often thick volumes, filled with abstracts of the early documents and photos of historic houses and people of the village. When such a Dorfbuch is published during a village’s anniversary year, it is often called a Festbuch, but will contain the same type of material as a Dorfbuch.
You’ve already learned about the large database of the Orts- books and other similar types of records at Genealogy.net <www.compgen.de>. But several other sites have databases like the Orts- books that you can reference online. These include the following:
Remember that many German village names are used multiple times in the country. Read enough of the site to know that you have the right town named Burg!
Many times, you will not be able to find a document naming a village or city but instead find the name of a political jurisdiction. In this instance, hope that the political jurisdiction named is not Prussia (Preuβen), since by the mid-1800s, Prussia ruled more than half of what became the Second German Empire in 1871. (All is not lost if this is the case—but you need to hope that you can narrow the origin down to a particular Prussian Provinz before conducting an effective search.) If you have the name of a specific German state or Prussian Provinz, you’ll find in this section that many sites have lists of emigrants from that geographic area. Also remember that, as you saw in chapter 6, Genealogy.net may also have databases and indexes like these.
In this section, I’ll identify some regional resources that can help you find your ancestors if you suspect they have come from a particular part of Germany. Since the exact village of origin is often among the pieces of information included in such emigrations lists, they can be the record that puts important data in your hands.
One of FamilySearch’s über genealogists, Baerbel Johnson, notes that one way to look for town genealogies is to use the German version of Google <www.google.de> and the village name along with keywords to locate lists of available and future publications: Ortsippenbuch, Dorfsippenbuch, Ortsfamilienbuch, Dorffamilienbuch, and Familienbuch.
This site <www.auswanderer-bw.de>, operated by the Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg (the Baden-Württemberg State Archives), has the records of more than 250,000 emigrants from Baden and Württemberg, most from the nineteenth century (image A.). Most of the names come from emigration indexes kept at the various civil registration offices. In the left frame, click Suche nach Auswanderern, then the Standard link next to the binoculars to view the search form (image B.). Vorname means first name and Name is for the family name. To search for a place of origin, first click a letter under the Herkunftsort field. Once you click the letter, the drop-down box will fill with standardized village names from which you can choose. You can search for a specific emigration year in the Emigr.jahr field, or you can simply narrow by century by clicking one of the check boxes under that field (Jh. is an abbreviation for Jahrhundert, which means “century”). You can narrow by any combination of destination places using the Erdteil check boxes.
The state archives in Baden-Württemberg hosts a database of more than 250,000 emigrants.
The Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg allows you to narrow your search by name, emigration year, or even emigration century.
Finally, you can choose whether to do a standard or full text (Volltext) search in the Suchmodus field, the number of results per page in the Treffer pro Seite field, and the way you would like the search results sorted in the Sortierung field. Click Daten Suchen to search. When the search results display, you can click the magnifying glass for a record of interest to bring up detailed information about the emigrant, including important pieces of information such as year of birth, marital status, occupation, the number of adults and children emigrating along with the subject, and a brief description of the circumstances that led up to emigration.
Reinhard Hofer is a German family history researcher, and he has compiled an index of more than seven thousand emigrants from Lower and Upper Bavaria, Upper Palatinate, and Frankonia in the years ranging from about 1830 to 1914 <home.arcor.de/emigration-research>. His sources include state and church archives and private collections, and the site lists just names and years. In order to get more detailed information about someone in the index, you will need to contact Reinhard through the contact links on the site. To browse the index by first letter of last name, click Emigrant name index along the left side of the page.
Think your ancestors lived in the big city? First, a point that will be review if you’ve read The Family Tree German Genealogy Guide: When you’re told that an ancestor came from a large city in Germany, especially if the emigration was earlier than the second half of the 1800s, realize that this may really mean the person came from a small village close to that large city, just as someone in America may come say they’re from “New York” when they really hail from East Meadow on Long Island.
But more and more emigrants did come from the burgeoning urban areas as the nineteenth century wore on, and city directories are great sources of information for these emigrants. Berlin’s city directories from 1799 to 1943 are available at <digital.zlb.de/viewer/cms/82>. Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org, and Genealogy.net all have some collections of city records and city directories, plus citizenship papers and tax rolls. Individual cities (especially larger ones) will also have their own archives. These resources can help you learn about your urban ancestors—and if they really lived in the city at all.
This site <www.passagierlisten.de> has more than seven hundred thousand emigration records compiled from passenger lists housed at the Staatsarchiv Bremen (Bremen State Archives). Most of the records are from the early 1900s, but a few are from the 1800s. The passenger lists are similar to others of their kind; information contained in the records may include age, marital status, occupation, place of residence, nationality, and destination. Use the Familienname field on the left side of the page to search by a last name. The original passenger list may be viewed by clicking on Originale link while looking at a computerized record.
This site <www.germanimmigrants1850s.com> contains information about more than 450,000 Germans who arrived in the United States in the 1850s. The site was created by Crafted Knowledge, a Web development company that specializes in bringing public domain data to the public for free. The information in the database most likely comes from passenger lists, although this is not explicitly stated on the site. To search for an emigrant, first click a letter at the bottom of the page, then click a combination of first and second letter of the emigrant’s last name and finally a surname (remember to look for as many spelling variations as you can think of). A list of the records in the database with that surname displays. Click a record to view information about the emigrant, including age, occupation, ship name, and destination.
This site <www.thomas-erbe.de/ahnen/buch/001.htm> has an index of names found in a book written by Fritz Gruhne that contains emigration lists from 1846 to 1871 from the former Duchy of Brunswick, which was centered in the city of Brunswick. However, the index does not contain names from the city of Brunswick or the Landkreis of Holzminden. To view actual records, you would need to look at the book itself or order the microfilmed version from FamilySearch (film number 1045468 item 10). Records in the book will generally contain the name of the emigrant, the date of emigration, and the names of the emigrant’s parents. Scroll down from the top of the page to view names in the index as well as from what page in the book they are taken.
This site <www.buer-us.de/Book1a.html> contains emigration records from the village of Buer, which is about ten miles east of the city of Osnabrück. The site is arranged alphabetically by last name. Click a name to view detailed biographical information about each emigrant with that name. Sources for this information include Buer church records, emigration lists at the Lower Saxony State Archive, and passenger and immigration lists, as well as stateside records like censuses and church books. Keep in mind that many of these sources would be classified as secondary.
This site <routes.de/tinc?key=aDbVINBZ&formname=CLAUS> contains almost six thousand records of emigrants from the modern-day Landkreise of Cloppenburg and Vechta, which are situated about thirty miles southwest of Bremen. The exact source of the information is not explicitly stated other than that it comes from the Oldenburg State Archives. However, based on the data they contain, they seem to be extracted from civil emigration lists. The records range from 1830 to 1875 and can be free-form searched using the text box at the top of the page next to Aktuelle Ansicht: Alle Einträge. Information contained in the records may include age, marital status, parents’ names, occupation, place of birth, place of residence, nationality, and destination.
This site <www.hapaghalle-cuxhaven.de/auswandererdatenbank> has about six thousand emigration records from the modern-day Landkreis of Cuxhaven, which is in the northern central part of Lower Saxony and includes the city of Cuxhaven. The records range from 1830 to 1930 and document mostly emigrants to North America. From the main site, click Akzeptiert, zur Datenbank to view the records in the database. According to its main page, the site is still in a test phase. Records may contain date of birth, place of birth, place of residence, parents’ names, emigration year, and destination.
This site <www.honkomp.de/damme-auswanderung> has around four thousand records from the former Amt Damme in the former Grand Duchy and later Free State of Oldenburg, which includes Damme, Holdorf, and Neuenkirchen in modern-day southwest Lower Saxony. Records generally only contain the year of emigration, place of residence, and other family members traveling with the emigrant and range from 1830 to 1880. Most of the emigrants were heading to North America. From the main page, click Contents overview, then on the next page click List by name of the emigrants. The best way to browse the records is probably by the letter group links at the bottom of the resulting page.
This site <www.emslanders.com> has more than thirty-five hundred entries of church and civil registration records from Emsland (modern-day western Lower Saxony along the border with Belgium), passenger lists and indexes, some stateside records from the Midwest, and some secondary sources compiled by other researchers. Each entry has a lot of detailed information about an emigrant (to the point of being almost biographical), much of which is secondary. Many records are also accompanied with a source statement tying back to primary sources. From the main page, click one of the letters corresponding to the first letter of the emigrant’s last name to get started.
This site <www.ggrs.com/emigrants>, operated by researcher Sabine Schleichert, has about nine thousand emigrant records from all over modern-day central Europe. The free PDF versions of the lists detail the year of emigration, the territory of residence, the destination, and any companions. For one hundred euros, Sabine will provide the exact place of origin for the emigrant as well as any other information about him or her contained within her database (including the source of the information). From the main page, click the relevant link under To the lists.
This site <www.lippe-auswanderer.de/htm/auswanderer-usa-eng.htm>, operated by the Naturwissenschaftlicher und Historischer Verein für das Land Lippe e.V. (Natural Science and History Association for the Lippe Country), has secondary biographical information for emigrants from the Landkreis Lippe in northeast North Rhine-Westphalia. Lippe includes the cities of Bad Salzuflen and Detmold as well as many other towns and villages. As its name implies, the site focuses on emigrants who left for the United States and contains information on thousands of emigrants. From the link above, click Data of emigrants, then select a first letter of last name and a last name to see the detailed data. Click the link for an emigrant to see more detailed information about that person.
The Institute for Migration and Ancestral Research (IMAR) has partnered with the Immigrant Genealogical Society (IGS) to create this database that currently contains about twenty thousand emigrants <www.immigrantgensoc.org/searches/imed/igs-imed.html>. The site itself only has an index of surnames contained in the database. However, if you provide them with information like your ancestor’s age, hometown, occupation, and year of emigration (plus a requested donation of ten US dollars), IGS volunteers can search the database for you ancestor and print seventeen fields worth of relevant information—plus instructions on how to order copies of original records—if they find a match. If they find multiple possible matches, they’ll send a list of options for you to evaluate.
This site <www.lang-germany.de/Archiv/Auswanderer_/auswanderer_.htm>, maintained by Kurt Lang, contains a few hundred emigration records from the village of Neuhausen ob Eck in the former Württemberg. They include mainly 1800s records for residents heading to Poland, Russia, Switzerland, France, and the United States. The information comes from town records. Scroll down from the top of the page to see individual records. Information included in the records are destination, age, occupation, and family members also emigrating.
The Nordfriisk Instituut, a Danish organization, runs this site <www.nordfriiskinstituut.de/indexausw_e.html>, which contains about five thousand emigrants from North Frisia, the northwestern part of the former Duchy of Schleswig that is now part of the German Land Schleswig-Holstein. The index cannot be browsed; it must be searched. Click databank-inquiry to search by family name, town, and date.
This list of several hundred records <www.rheineahnen.de/listdoc/auswand.htm>, mostly from the 1800s, was compiled by Wilfried Brümmer, a native of the list’s subject city of Rheine (west of Osnabrück and north of Münster in North Rhine-Westphalia). Like many of the other databases, this one contains biographical information that has been compiled and is secondary in nature, so you’ll need to verify it.
When looking for urban ancestors (basically, for anyone in a town with more than one Catholic or Protestant church), don’t forget to check to see if Kirchenbuchduplikat (KBD) registers, such as those described in the FamilySearch.org chapter, are available. If they are—and you have a fairly narrow time frame—you can search a year or several years more quickly than wading through several different churches’ records.
This site <www.rheingau-genealogie.de/seite16.htm>, maintained by Norbert Michel, contains around one thousand emigrants from the Rheingau region of Hesse, which is about twenty miles west of Frankfurt. The data contains the place of residence, destination, the date of emigration, and comments about the emigration (many times including occupation and companions). The sources of the information are generally secondary in nature. On the site’s home page, click Auflistung der Rheingauer Auswanderer (PDF-Datei) to browse the records.
This site <www.rootdigger.de/Emi.htm> is maintained by Klaus Struve, a researcher who lives in Kiel. The site contains almost one hundred thousand emigrants from Schleswig-Holstein in the 1800s. Click a letter along the left side of the page to download a Word file that contains the estimated or exact date of birth, destination, and details of the emigration (many of which are not actual emigration records but accusations by authorities that a person may have emigrated illegally).
This site <www.hans-peter-voss.de/gen/e> is operated by Hans-Peter Voss, a researcher from Steenfeld, and contains a few emigrant list links, including Emigrants from Schleswig-Holstein to America, 1636–1667; Dithmarschen emigrants, 1868–1920 (about thirty-six hundred people); Rendsburg emigrants, 1868–1884 (more than five hundred people); and Emigrants from the island of Fehmarn, 1871–1882. Click the links from the home page to view the data. The site also has useful information about old German handwriting and historical maps of Prussia and the German Empire.
This site <www.amerikanetz.de/beitraege/?&no_cache=1&L=0> contains links to many smaller lists of emigrants from Westphalia in the 1800s. The best method to use the site may be to search by name or village using the text box at the top containing the word Suchbegriff.
Sometimes searching for your ancestors can seem like a cruel game stacked against you. But with careful research, dutiful documentation, and proper consideration of the time periods involved, you can track down your ancestor’s Heimat. You can download a Word-document version of this worksheet at <ftu.familytreemagazine.com/trace-your-german-roots-online>.
