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:
- Are there several towns with that name, and if so, which one is the correct one?
- Where are the Lutheran church and the Catholic church that would have records for the town?
- |If the churches have placed the records in archives for safekeeping, which archives have jurisdiction for the area?
- If you are looking for civil registration records (anything after 1876, and in some states sooner), where is the Standesamt (civil registry office) located?
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
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At first a list will appear of every town with that name:
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You can choose to filter the list by province:
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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
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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. |
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An Example of a Kartenmeister Entry
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Kartenmeister Search Engine
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A Typical Kartenmeister Record
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
Church Directories
Each Germany province page has links for current church directories under the section Writing to an Priest for Church Records. Look for this:
Generally, these directories are set up so that you can enter a name of a village, and the directory will give you the address for the appropriate parish. Here is an example:
If the churches have placed the records in archives for safekeeping, which archives have jurisdiction for the area?
Sometimes, local church records are donated to church archives for safekeeping. Also, for certain time periods, duplicates of the church records were supposed to be sent to the government to act as civil registration. So you can contact archives to find records. The trick is to locate the correct archives. Each Germany province page has links for the appropriate archives. Some of the listings have a link to lists for the church records that can be found at the archives. Here is an example:
Germany Genealogy#
If you are looking for civil registration records (anything after 1876, and in some states sooner), where is the Standesamt (civil registry office) located?
Determine the Standesamt (Civil Registry Office) Location
- For towns covered by Kartenmeister, the Standesamt is listed in every entry:
- In MeyersGaz.org the location of the Standesamt is indicated by the abbreviation "StdA".
Finding the New Consolidated Standesamt
- However, some of the offices were merged in 1970's, so the record location might be different than that listed in MeyersGaz.
- For a municipality:
- To find the current Standesamt, go to the German Wikipedia, and enter the name of the town in the search box. An article about the town will start with a first line such as: "Besse with about 3200 inhabitants is the largest district of the municipality Edermünde in Hessian Schwalm-Eder-Kreis ." It is probable that the Standesamt is now located in the municipality (in this example Edermünde).
- Email the municipality to verify that the civil registry for your town is there. From the town article, click on the name of the municipality that links to that article. There will usually be an infobox on the page that lists the address and the website of the municipality. From the website, look for Kontakt (Contact) information with an email address.
- For a town:
- Follow the same instructions as for a municipality. However, in this case, the first line will read, for example: "Borken is a town in the Schwalm-Eder-Kreis with about 13,000 residents.
- The infobox with the website will appear directly on a town page.
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