Baden-Württemberg, Germany Genealogy

Europe Germany  Baden-Württemberg (Baden-Württemberg)

Guide to Baden-Württemberg (Baden-Württemberg), Germany ancestry, family history, and genealogy: birth records, marriage records, death records, census records, parish registers, and military records.

Welcome to the Baden-Württemberg (Baden-Württemberg) page! FamilySearch Wiki is a community website dedicated to helping people throughout the world learn how to find their ancestors. Through this page you can learn how to find, use, and analyze records of genealogical value. The content is variously targeted to beginners, intermediate, and expert researchers. This is a work in progress, your contributions and feedback are essential!

Find Important Information About Your Ancestors' Town

 * To begin using the records of Germany, knowing that your family came from Hessen will not be enough to use the records of Germany. Records are kept on the local level, so you will have to know the town they lived in.
 * Details about the town will also help:
 * the county or "Kreis" of that town,
 * where the closest Evangelical Lutheran or Catholic parish church was (depending on their religion),
 * where the civil registration office ("Standesamt") was, and
 * if you have only a village name, you will need the name of the larger town it was part of.

Gathering Information to Locate Place of Origin
If you do not yet know the name of the town of your ancestor's birth, there are well-known strategies for a thorough hunt for it.
 * Use Gathering Information to Locate Place of Origin as a guide in exhausting every possible record to find what you need.

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.
 * Use MeyersGaz, the digital gazetteer, to find the details you need, particularly the Kreis (county) it belonged to, found after "Kr".
 * MeyersGaz Help Guide
 * Abbreviation Table

Here is part of an entry from MeyersGaz.org. (The whole entry can be studied at Heusenstamm, MeyersGaz.)

Research Tools

 * German Word List
 * Latin Word List
 * Handwriting
 * Handwriting Guide
 * German Handwriting Tutorial
 * Kurrentschrift Converter (enter German genealogical word, click on "convert", view your word in Kurrentschrift (Gothic handwriting)*German Chronological Jurisdictions

Administrative Districts
In April of 1952 Baden-Württemberg officially became a State in Germany. This occurred upon a referendum of the three federal states, Württemberg-Hohenzollern, Baden, and Württemberg-Baden that had been established a the end of World War II.

Today Baden-Württemberg is divided into thirty-five (Landkreise) and nine independent cities (Stadtkreise), then grouped into the four administrative districts, in German Regierungsbezirke (singular, Regierungsbezirk). The four districts are Freiburg, Karlsruhe, Stuttgart and Tübingen.