Germany Church Records: Difference between revisions

Church records were kept in the local parish of the church. The term parish refers to the jurisdiction of a church minister. Parishes are local congregations that may have included many neighboring villages in their boundaries.  

To use church records, you must know both your ancestor's religion and the town where he or she lived. You must also determine in which parish the town was located.  

 

Some gazetteers indicate parish jurisdictions. For more information, see [[Germany Gazetteers|Germany Gazetteers]] and the section below that discusses church record inventories.

 

A small village that did not have its own church was usually assigned to a parish in a nearby larger town. Consequently, your ancestor may have lived in one village but belonged to a parish in another town. Some parishes had branch churches in neighboring towns. Over time, some villages may have belonged to several parishes as jurisdictions changed. In Schleswig-Holstein, each local district parish office [Kreis Pfarramt] has custody of Protestant records.  

 

The FamilySearch Catalog refers to parishes by the town in which the parish church was located, unless there was more than one church in the town. In large cities, there may be many parishes for each religion. Church buildings were often named for saints, so the catalog uses the church name (such as Sankt Pauli Bremen) to distinguish between different parishes in the same city.