Finding Aids for German Records

Once you have learned the name of the town in Germany where your ancestors lived, there are several questions you need to answer:

1. Are there several towns with that name, and if so, which one is the correct one?
2. Where are the Lutheran church and the Catholic church that would have records for the town?
3. If the churches have placed the records in archives for safekeeping, which archives have jurisdiction for the area?
4. If you are looking for civil registration records (anything after 1876, and in some states sooner), where is the Standesamt (civil registry office) located?
5. Are any of these records microfilmed and/or digitized by FamilySearch?
6. Are any of these records available online through other repositories?

Some of these questions will be answered in the Wiki Germany province page for your province in Germany. This article will teach you about some geographical reference aids that might also help you.

Are there several towns with that name, and if so, which one is the correct one?

Two great online gazetteers will help you find details about any location in Germany: MeyersGaz Online Gazetteer and Kartenmeister. Here are two online classes that will teach you how to use these: Meyer's Gazetteer Now Online, Indexed and Fully Searchable! and Finding Places in the Former German Areas of Poland Using the Online Gazetteer Kartenmeister.com

Find All the Towns of That Name in Meyers Gazetteer

Once you know the town name you need, the other facts you need are contained in Meyers Orts- und Verkehrs-lexikon des deutschen Reichs, the gazetteer on which the FamilySearch catalog for Germany is based. This covers Germany as it existed in 1871, recently unified from its former existence as many small countries.

• Use MeyersGaz, the digital gazetteer, to find all the towns with that name in Germany in 1871.
• MeyersGaz Help Guide Abbreviation Table

At first a list will appear of every town with that name:

You can choose to filter the list by province:

Go back to the records you have found for your ancestor in the United States to look for clues to the province (state, duchy, kingdom, etc.). Actually, it is more likely that this information showed up in your earlier searches than that the town showed up. If you still need to search those records for more clues, see Germany Gathering Information to Locate Place of Origin.

If you cannot find other clues to narrow down the list of towns, you might have to check each town until you find the records you need.

Where are the Lutheran church and the Catholic church that would have records for the town?

The two dominant religious groups in Germany were Catholics and Evangelical Lutherans. Your town may have been the site of the main parish church for one or both of the religions, or it might have been a village within a larger parish. So your next task is to find the parish church that kept the records for your town.

If Your Town Is No Longer in Germany

Actually, this is easiest if your town is no longer in Germany today.

Kartenmeister

Study this map. If your town was in East Prussia, Pomerania (east of the Oder Neisse line), Posen, Silesia, or West Prussia, you will be able to find it in Kartenmeister. Kartenmeister covers areas of Germany that were given to other countries (Poland, Russia, Lithuania, and Czechoslavakia) in the treaties following the World Wars. Find your town in Kartenmeister.com to learn the name and upper jurisdictions that the town became known by after 1945, the location of Catholic and Lutheran parishes, and Standesamt locations.

An Example of a Kartenmeister Entry

Kartenmeister Search Engine To use Kartenmeister, simply enter the German name of the town in the search field. Notice in the Kartenmeister record on the right that the names of the Lutheran and Catholic parishes are given.

A Typical Kartenmeister Record The most important information points here are the name of the Lutheran parish, the name of the Catholic parish, and the location of the civil registry office (Standesamt). Notice in the red box that Kartenmeister gives you this information:

If Your Town Is Still in Germany

Here are some methods you can use to find the parishes for areas still in Germany today:

Meyer's Gazetteer

There are two ways that Meyer's Gazetteer can inform you on parish location:

In the main entry, if the town has its own parish, it will say so for both Catholic (kath. Pfk.) and Lutheran (ev. Pfk.). See an example in the red box.

At the top of the main entry, there is an option to click on "Ecclesiastical". This will bring up a list of all the closest Catholic and Lutheran parishes and their distance from the town. You can then check those parishes for records about your ancestor.

Kevan Hansen's “Map Guide to German Parish Registers”

Kevan Hansen has prepared a 53-volume guide to maps of all the parishes in Germany, both Cathoilc and Lutheran (with information about minority religious groups--Jewish, French Protestant, etc.). To learn about these guides and how to use them, watch this online course: Hansen’s Map Guides: Finding Records with Parish Maps. These are available at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah. They can also be purchased online at bookstores such as Amazon.com.

A Few Tricks to Try

Google Maps

• Look for your town on Google Maps with the phrase: Churches near [your town]. You will get a map showing symbols and names for churches in the vicinity. On the left will be an actual address list for the churches.>

Wikipedia.de (German Wikipedia)

• There is a dedicated German Wikipedia, which you can choose to have displayed in English, that has a great deal more detail about Germany than the English Wikipedia. Here is an example of the detail you might find there about the religious institutions within a city:

FamilySearch Catalog

• One of your eventual questions is whether the church records you seek have been microfilmed or digitized by FamilySearch. You can just by-pass all this geography and jump to checking to see if FamilySearch has the records. If the town is a parish, it might show up immediately in that system. Occasionally a town will show up listed under the parish that has it records. Go to the FamilySearch Catalog and enter the name of the town in the "Place" search field. If there is an item there for any town of that name, the catalog will bring up a list, automatically adding country and province information.

Are any of these records available online through other repositories?

familysearch catalog

• Google
• Province page
• Archion
• Address directory
• Archives
• email the mayor