Talk:German Church Record Locator

Use a series of tables?
I was pleasantly surprised to see so many archives linked to all in one place here. Thanks.

I found this page because it has been taking me extra time to locate German church records that I need. I have used the FS Library, ProGenealogists Gazeteers, and Google to find sources I need. Now I want to make it easier for others so they do not go through the same headache.

Purpose

Make it clear where each record is held without the patron having to navigate a German website.

Background

The church records can be held by a state archive, church archive, or local church. There is no simple way to link straight to the website for the group that holds the records you want.

Suggestion

Create a partially sortable table--for each German state--, similar to the ProGenealogist Gazeteers, but with live links and more thorough. Give links to the archives websites, and a link to the online collection or FS Library entry if available. Provide actual years covered as different archives have different year ranges sometimes.

Suggested headings:

Town or parish | Kreis or Kantone | Evangelical Archive | Catholic Archive | State Archive | Online or FS Library

Suggested row content:

Obersickte | [TBD] | Braunschweig (1815-1952) | [TBD] | Wolfenbüttel (1719-1814) | FS Library (1815-1845)

Is anyone willing to make suggestions on altering this idea or joining a project to make it happen? Maybe a Wiki project?

--McCormickMW 19:40, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments.

I created the locator to make it easier to determine just what records are held in each of the many German Archives. I agree it would be terrific to list each of the thousands of towns in Germany, followed by the location and extent of the records available. This would generate thousands of pages of listings. It would be a huge project for which I just don't have the time. It could also run into copyright issues, because it would involve copying the records on the various existing copyrighted web sites. In accordance with Research Wiki policies, I have concentrated on linking to existing sites.

The fist place to go when looking for a record is the FS catalog to see if it has been filmed by the LDS. If it has, you don't need the locator. For those that have not been filmed, the locator lets you know which parishes exist, frequently the extent of the records and which have been filmed, and the location of the records or the microfilms. At that point you need to either write to the parish or hire a researcher. The locator lets you avoid wasting writing or hiring a researcher to find a record that doesn't exist. The ProGenealogist gazetteers, for much of Germany, tell you which Catholic and protestant parishes cover each village. They sometimes tell you which parish covered a village before the establishment of the villages own parish. Unfortunately, they don't tell you the extent or location of the records. These gazetters do not cover all of Germany.

The Meyers' Gazetteer, available on ancestry.com, lists every village in the German Empire as of 1910 or so. The listings will tell you if a village/town, etc. had a parish church (ev. PfK or kath. Pfk.) in 1910, but it does not list the applicable parish for towns that did not have their own. It also does not list the year of founding. In cities with multiple churches, it lists the number of, but not the names of the individual churches.

When my link connects you to a German language web site, and the listing of parishes does not appear immediately, I have given instructions on how to navigate the web site to the list. Unfortunately, these lists are sometimes on pages that do not have their own unique web addresses.

If you locate resources that are not listed, please feel free to add them. Please add any German language records. They are frequently found in Switzerland, Austria, Poland, Russia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Croatia, Romania and Moldova. Although Catholic records are usually written in Latin, please include them for areas with significant German speaking populations.

Thanks for your interest.

--Tom Hutzelman 21:17, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

Thh01 21:24, 8 February 2013 (UTC)