Talk:Germany Church Records

Thanks!
Thanks for adding the Catholic and Lutheran charts! That was a great idea!Hanna5974 (talk)Hanna5974Hanna5974 (talk)

Why?
Why did you remove the Polish provinces? Explain your logic.

What is the geographical scope of this article? I believe it is meant to be the modern boundaries of Germany, not the old German empire. I notice that the Polish Church records https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/Poland_Church_Records page quite clearly deals with the parts of Poland formerly in Germany/Prussia. If you decide that we are to use former boundaries of Germany, we would also need to add records from Bohemia, Belgium, the Baltics and France. I think this would be confusing for users, and would lead to duplication across the entire wiki with content mentioned under both the modern day country and the historical country. And I also believe the table should just use the 20 Regional Churches/Landeskirche (and the Polish provinces if you rule that we must use the old boundaries of Germany), instead of mixing ecclesiastial boundaries with civil provinces and kingdoms (e.g. Mecklenburg-Stirlitz). My text refers users to the map later in the article of the regional churches, in case users are unfamiliar with regional church boundaries. --Av85647 (talk) 17:19, 8 December 2019 (MST)

Oh
If you study the Germany Genealogy main page you will see that it is completely organized around the German Empire, not modern Germany. Two reasons for this are: 1) all of the records in the FamilySearch system are organized around the German Empire, 2) most people are interested in German genealogical research prior to the World Wars, not just since the wars and the boundary changes they produced.

Remember that committee I told you about--I had originally written all the Germany pages based on modern geography. They made me re-do the whole thing based on the German Empire--which project I have worked on for nine months. I just calmly obeyed because they were far more knowledgable about German research than me. One advantage I began to see is that it broke Germany down into much more manageable chunks.

So I have added the Polish provinces back to the page and also added in the Mecklenburg states, which seemed to be left out.

So for each German area there is a German Empire page and a modern German state page. The modern page just covers research for after the World Wars--emphasizing civil registration, usually written requests because of the privacy laws. It has links to the necessary earlier German Empire pages.

The German Empire articles do not cover research prior to 1871, Links in the articles lead to Belgium and France as necessary. The Baltics and Bohemia did not belong to the German Empire. Hanna5974 (talk)Hanna5974Hanna5974 (talk)

I will comply with this decision, but would like to ask if ordinary wiki editors such as myself can become more involved in high-level decision making on this wiki. I have heard something about a weekly users chat/skype meeting??

You will see that I'm editing the page https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/Finding_Parish_Registers_for_Germany_Areas_Now_in_Other_Countries to make the content more organised and complete. --Av85647 (talk) 22:33, 8 December 2019 (MST)

Meetings
I'm glad you are editing that page. I should update some of the links that broke when we wrote the new Germany pages.

The only high-level decision making body is the Governance Council, and it is a select number of individuals representing various stake holding organizations. There is a training meeting every week for new and ongoing projects. You wouldn't be interested in those. They usually involve a lot of repetitive cutting and pasting. There is a manager, Danielle Batson, who supervises everything and does the final decision making, subject to input from the Governance Council. I answer directly to her. But all that is done with only occasional meetings. There is a weekly training meeting for volunteer missionaries from the LDS Church that meets on Webex, but it doesn't have a decision-making function--more just training, moral support, answering any questions they have come up with, announcing policy changes. These missionaries tend to be retired and elderly, novices at both computer work and genealogy research. So it is more of a babysitting meeting--no decision-making. That is probably the weekly meeting you have heard of. Then occasionally we might put together a group collaboration project that meets regularly.

Thanks again for your valuable contributions. Hanna5974 (talk)Hanna5974Hanna5974 (talk)