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. f 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. 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.

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): Meyer's Gazetteer Kevan Hansen's Parish Guides

Are any of these records available online through other repositories?

• Find the province.
• meyers and kartenmeister
• Hansens parish maps
• Online Tricks

familysearch catalog

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