Former Eastern European German-speaking enclaves
In chapter one, you’ll recall that we limited the scope of this book to the boundaries of the Second German Empire plus Switzerland and Austria. This chapter discusses those the latter two nations, both of which have German-speaking majorities, as well as making brief mentions of two German-speaking microstates (Luxembourg and Liechtenstein). It also includes a short look at the many German-speaking enclaves that once speckled the map of Eastern Europe. The important takeaway is that many people with “German” ancestry will discover that for at least one of the family lines, the word “German” was referring to language rather than heritage stemming from within any historical iteration of German political boundaries.
Most of the chapter homes in on Switzerland, where about two-thirds of the people speak German as their first language, and Austria, now an almost entirely German-speaking nation. But aside from sharing the language, both nations have very different histories from that of the many areas making up today’s Germany.
The area that is present-day Switzerland was a part of the Roman Empire in ancient times and then part of Charlemagne’s Frankish Empire in the late eighth and early ninth centuries A.D. Like German territory in medieval times, medieval Swiss territory consisted of small states (known as cantons) led by minor rulers. These states were part of the Holy Roman Empire for several hundred years. In the thirteenth century, three mountainous forest cantons formed the Swiss Confederation (named after one of the three cantons—Schwyz) and declared independence from the Holy Roman Empire. More cantons joined over the centuries until Switzerland’s current boundaries were reached in 1815, when the Congress of Vienna reshaped Europe after the defeat of French Emperor Napoleon I. The congress declared Switzerland as politically nonaligned, and this neutrality was respected in both World Wars.
Present-day Switzerland consists of twenty-six cantons, which are politically equivalent to states in the United States federal system. A couple million Americans have Swiss ancestry, with a large majority stemming from the German-speaking cantons of Bern and Zürich. There are six French-speaking cantons and one Italian-speaking canton. About six percent of the population speaks Romansch, a Latin-based Romance language that is the fourth of Switzerland’s national tongues.
The cantons are divided into municipal communities known as communes, and the first thing that genealogists must take into account with Swiss research is that “rights of citizenship” (Heimatberechtigung) are found on the level of the commune. These citizenship rights often stayed with a family even after they left the commune. The result is the commune keeps records (including baptisms, marriages, and deaths) about people who no longer reside in that original commune. It’s estimated today that some 80 percent of the Swiss people reside in a different commune from the one in which they have citizenship.
So you may not find records for an ancestor in the town in which he lived. His records may be kept in his original commune. How can you determine that original commune? One very helpful resource is the published version of the Swiss surname registry (Familiennamenbuch der Schweiz). The third edition of this registry was published in 1989 as a three-volume set and was made available in the four official Swiss languages as well as English. It is out of print, but can be found in major genealogical libraries and online at <www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/famn/?lg=e>.
A similar compilation on CD-ROM called Familiennamen der schweizer Bürger bis 1861 is available. In both cases, these compilations take each surname and list in which communes people with that surname are found. This helps people with less common surnames to pinpoint just a few communes in which to search. One additional catch is that if a surname became “extinct” in that commune (for instance, if every family of that name emigrated), it is not found in these compilations. Examples of some more localized surname publications are listed in the appendices.
The most important Swiss records are its parish registers (similar to those kept in Germany) of baptisms, confirmations, communions, marriages, and burials. The baptismal records will ordinarily contain the names of the child, his or her parents and godparents (who often were relatives), as well as the dates of birth and baptism. Confirmation will list the name of the individual and his or her father as well as an age in years. Communion records, usually organized by family group, are the equivalent of church membership lists in bygone centuries. Marriage records give the names of the bride and groom as well as their residences, but ordinarily do not give the names of the bridal partners’ fathers as is traditional for records in Germany. Burials give the name of the deceased, dates of death and burial, and usually some type of age notation—sometimes an exact amount of years, months, and days, while other times a mere estimate such as “about forty years old.”
Swiss parish registers—which also sometimes include “family registers” with the pastoral acts organized by those relating to each married couple—typically begin around 1550 for churches that turned Protestant in the Reformation while most Roman Catholic registers begin about 1600. There were also many Anabaptists (predecessors of today’s Amish and Mennonites) in Switzerland, but they were often persecuted and as a result did not keep documentation that might lead to further harassment and even death. However, the church registers for Protestant (called Reformed or Evangelical Reformed in Switzerland) and Catholic churches were established and used for civil purposes, so some Anabaptist families show up in these registers. A large number of parish registers have been microfilmed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ Family History Library (FHL), and an increasing number have been digitized with images available on its website <familysearch.org>.
Standardized registration of vital records didn’t begin until 1876, though a handful of cantons began to document these acts earlier than that date. A few have been microfilmed by FHL and the rest remain in archives in Switzerland. Access to non-microfilmed vital records in Switzerland is usually limited to people who are licensed or certified.
A few irregular Swiss censuses were taken in the first half of the nineteenth century and for the most part, their genealogical valuable increases starting in 1850, which is also when the Swiss began a regular ten-year census cycle. Among the cantons, Zürich has an excellent track record for pre-1850 census records that go back to the seventeenth century, while the city of Bern has only one census from 1764 and a compilation of the residents of the canton from 1798, which has been published under the title Men of Bern by Lewis Bunker Rohrbach.
Emigration from the Swiss cantons took several forms. Some Swiss came directly to America beginning around the turn of the seventeenth century into the eighteenth; however, a fairly large number were “two-steppers” who left Switzerland to repopulate areas along the Rhine River—particularly Alsace and the Pfalz region—that were devastated by the Thirty Years’ War (which ended in 1648). In another two to three generations, many of these newcomers soured on life in the Rhine Valley, drawn away by additional wars in the area and reports of better economic opportunity in America.
While Austria’s population (both historically and today) has been higher than Switzerland’s, the number of Americans descended from immigrants who came from within today’s Austrian boundaries are only in the thousands compared to the millions who have Swiss ancestry. But, Austria’s former prominence on the European stage makes its records more important than would be otherwise indicated by those numbers.
Because of the many non-German-speaking minorities that were included in the Austrian empire, some American records—from censuses to naturalizations—will show “Austria” as a nation of origin and “Austrian” as a nationality. In these cases, make note of the mother tongue spoken listed in the record. For example, records of an ancestor who listed a Slavic language as mother tongue would be located outside of today’s Austria. But be aware that many German-speaking enclaves peppered the eastern edge of Austria-Hungary and its successor states until the end of World War II. If the American record lists Austria as the nation of origin and German as the mother tongue, double check the ancestor’s religion. Most people from the Austrian heartland (present-day Austria) were Catholic. Most of the German-speaking people in the enclaves were Protestant. It is worth noting that Austria’s capital city, Vienna, was home to many Jews before World War II. JewishGen Austria/Czech Special Interest Group has a primer on tracing Jews from this area on its website at <www.jewishgen.org/austriaczech/ausguide.htm>.
Most of present-day Austria was also held by the Romans in ancient times, and the area was the easternmost outpost of Charlemagne’s empire, which is where its German-language name by which it is still known today, Österreich (meaning “eastern borderland”), comes from. The area remained a backwater on the border between German-speaking peoples to the west and Hungarians and Slavs to the east for a number of centuries until the late 1200s. That’s when the duchies making up present-day Austria were acquired by Rudolf of Habsburg, then lord of some territories in southwest Germany and modern Switzerland, whose ambition culminated in wearing the crown of the Holy Roman Empire as one of Charlemagne’s successors. The history of the Habsburgs in the context of Germany is covered in chapter four.
After World War I, Austria became a small, almost exclusively German-speaking state as the Austria-Hungary empire was carved up into what became today’s Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia. Part of one of present-day Austria’s federal states, Burgenland, had been administered by Hungary until the empire was broken apart.
In terms of religion, present-day Austria is primarily Roman Catholic. While there were a substantial number of Protestants within the boundaries of Habsburg territories after the Reformation, there were waves of expulsions up to 1781 when a law of toleration was decreed by the emperor.
Unfortunately, relatively few of Austria’s Roman Catholic parish registers have been microfilmed by the FHL; in fact, a substantial number are still housed in the original parishes, which are staffed by a smaller number of priests, making requests for research in these records a hit-or-miss affair. (Protestants up to the 1781 “Patent of Tolerance” are found in the Catholic records; there are some—primarily Lutheran—Protestant records after that date.) Many of the Catholic dioceses have archives with websites. The St. Pölten and Vienna dioceses have digitized their church records with the help of a European Union grant that makes them available free online at <www.matricula-online.eu>.
Making up in part for the lack of parish records is a large volume of military records from Austria’s empire period. The FHL has literally thousands of rolls of microfilm that contain these records because most men living within the empire owed at least some military service. The major categories of these records include:
In all cases, the FHL films cover men from the districts that are part of present-day Austria, not other parts of the empire. For the records that are arranged by regiment, the FHL has microfilmed a 320-page typescript, Dislokationsverzeichnis des k.u.k. Heeres und der k.u.k. Marine (“Location Index for Recruitment into the Imperial and Royal Austrian Army and Navy Troops”) by Otto Kasperkowitz. This index shows the locations in which regiments, battalions, and other units had permission to recruit. The military records are not easy to use and the success rate of using them to determine the military man’s home village is relatively low, but they are the best records that are widely available.
FamilySearch’s digitization initiative is making another category of Austrian records accessible. These are called “Seigniorial Records,” which are registers of court records kept by the feudal lords. These records give many family relationships and include marriage contracts, inventories of estates, and transfers of feudal land leases from one generation to another.
The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and the Principality of Liechtenstein are neither grand nor princely in size, yet they are independent states. Luxembourg has a population of about half a million today but at one time it was a major power in the Holy Roman Empire. It was first mentioned in 963 and later supplied members of its ruling house as emperors in the 1300s and early 1400s. Its territory was reduced over the centuries and now is a wedge between France, Belgium, and Germany; official languages are German, French, and a High German dialect called Luxembourgish.
Liechtenstein, in contrast, was created in 1719, when its lands (then known as the Herrschaft of Schellenberg and Vaduz) were purchased by the Liechtenstein family in a successful attempt to gain a seat in the Imperial diet. With a population of just 36,000, Liechtenstein is one of Europe’s smallest states but also its wealthiest in per capita income.
The free FamilySearch website <familysearch.org> has a number of records available for both Luxembourg and Liechtenstein including databases of Roman Catholic baptisms and digital images of Luxembourg’s civil registrations of births, marriages, and deaths from 1793 to 1923. Civil registration in Luxembourg began in the 1790s while it was under the domination of the French Republic and continued even after French control ended.
German-speaking enclaves began forming around Eastern Europe starting in the High Middle Ages. Some were as small as single villages but many enclaves made up entire regions within other states. For the first few centuries, those who migrated were true “pioneers” who, for the most part, set up stakes in areas of Eastern Europe that were previously uninhabited or only sparsely populated.
Pioneer groups included Deutschbalten (the Baltic Germans of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), Sudeten Germans in the Czech Republic, Karpatendeutsche (Carpathian Germans in what’s now Slovakia and Ukraine), Sieberburgen Sachsen (Transylvanian Saxons, now in Romania), and Gottscheer (a district in today’s Slovenia).
Beginning in the late 1600s but gaining speed in the 1700s, other German-speaking groups were planted as “colonists.” Included in the “colonist” group are the thousands who answered the call of the two great German-speaking empresses of the eighteenth century, Austria’s Maria Theresa and Russia’s Catherine the Great. The largest groups from the colonist era were the Donauschwaben (literally “Danubian Swabians,” who filled many colonies near the Danube River in modern Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, and Romania), and those Germans who settled in areas of Russia (in the Volga River area, around the Black Sea, Bessarabia, and Volhynia) many of whom now have come to the United States and go by the collective name of “Germans from Russia.”
Unfortunately the enclaves are now lost to history and descendants of most of the groups are scattered. Many civil records for these enclaves are in the various languages of the nations in which their enclaves existed. The availability of church records varies from enclave to enclave; for instance, the German-language registers from the Sudetenland have been digitized and are available online. The good news is there are many organizations devoted to the history of the enclaves, and these organizations have a great passion for their genealogy and attempt to help others find their connections. Connecting with these groups will help you locate records and resources available for the enclaves. Find a full listing of these organizations in the appendices.
Former Eastern European German-speaking enclaves