I began my genealogical quest in the Gutenberg age: the one in which you methodically produced pedigree and family group charts on paper, waited sometimes months or years for someone to answer a query, and put the greatest stock in the monthly meetings of your local genealogical society.
But my quest continues in the digital age in which family trees can be shared globally, communication can be instant, and many “meetings” are virtual linkups called webinars. While some nostalgia remains for the “good ol’ days,” that sense is overwhelmed by the enormity of information, often freely available, right on a computer desktop.
This book is a product of the realization that German genealogy has reached a tipping point in the journey from Gutenberg to digital. An irony of this process is that many Gutenberg-age products—books and newspapers—are no less important to the genealogist today than they were back then; it’s just that their format and accessibility has changed radically as the information has been made available through scanned digital images (in the case of historical paper documents) and as more resources have been “born digital” in today’s electronic environment.
One of my first inklings that such a tipping point was coming happened in 2002 when I was haunting Internet genealogy bulletin boards in an effort to find information on a family named Rauch—more specifically, on Gertraut, a woman who one of my Rauch ancestors married but whose maiden name I couldn’t find any evidence for. She was one of several female ancestors for which I had the “tease” of an exact birth date (this one in 1770) but no clue in any later records linking her to her family before her marriage to Jacob Rauch.
Within hours of my inquiry post, a researcher named DelLynn Leavitt from Idaho Falls, Idaho, replied that he knew that she was the daughter of Jacob Sicher. With that, the power of Internet research was proven to me without a doubt as it brought together researchers who were geographically far apart. Correspondence with this researcher, as well as articles he’s posted on the Internet, also led to several further generations in my Rauch line itself, including pushing my family tree back to the town of origin in Europe, which is almost always the Holy Grail for genealogical researchers. Of course, I was ecstatic at these finds, but DelLynn kind of shrugged it off: “I do enjoy helping other people out,” he said. “And most of my best leads lately have come from individuals who I have helped out at one time or another and are returning the favor.”
Now, more than a dozen years later, one of my motivations for writing this book is to return his favor and many others I’ve received over the years. It is my hope that this book will enable its readers to open virtual doors that reveal further information about their German ancestry and allow them the great satisfaction that comes with a long Deutsch pedigree.
James M. Beidler
Leesport, Pennsylvania