By James M. Beidler
Trace your ancestry in Prussia, Bavaria and more with our guide to research in Germany’s historical regions.
In this era of globalization, it’s easy to think of
ourselves as citizens of the world. If you turn the clock back a
century, though, you’ll see people took a much more regional view.
Italians considered themselves Sicilians, Sardinians, Tuscans or
Venetians. Regional loyalties in America helped start the Civil War.
And the people we now call Germans referred to themselves as anything
but.
In
those days, you had Prussians and Bavarians, Palatines and Hessians,
Saxons and Swabians—who all spoke various dialects of German and were
united only in their dislike for each other. “In Europe as well as
America, immigrants who came from Prussia didn’t like the immigrants
from Bavaria, and the Bavarians didn’t like the Prussians,” says German
genealogy scholar John T. Humphrey. “And immigrants from Swabia in
southern Germany did not like either one.”
Because
finding a German immigrant’s village of origin is so crucial to
genealogical research, this more provincial view can be helpful in
narrowing the search from “Germany” to a more-manageable area. But
territorial shifts can create difficulties in matching up the names of
current and former entities to which the villages belonged.
How
this evolved is the stuff of many volumes, but in short, Germany’s
history is unlike that of England, France or Spain, where the king’s
central authority eclipsed feudal nobles’ power by the 1600s. Germany,
on the other hand, remained a collection of several hundred independent
states until unification in 1871.
This
patchwork political landscape is good and bad for genealogists. Before
the 1870s, record-keeping was inconsistent from one German state to
another—and availability is spotty. But if you can pinpoint an
immigrant’s origin in a particular German state, your ancestral search
will be kein
Problem.
Moving from micro to macro
Over
the centuries, some local dynasties became extinct and others married
into new amalgamations of territories. Until a reorganization in the
early 1800s, the average German “microstate” had a mere 2,500 people,
and boundaries changed constantly. Following the Protestant Reformation
in the 16th and 17th centuries, each state was supposed to adopt its
ruler’s religion, but this often wasn’t uniformly enforced.
One
big German word spelled the end for a lot of little states in 1803:
Reichsdeputationshauptschluss—the final high
decision of the Imperial Diet of the Holy Roman Empire. It eliminated
the microstates and secularized the ecclesiastical states that had been
under the power of Roman Catholic bishops and archbishops. This reduced
the number of German states from several hundred to just 39 in
1815.
The
climate had become ripe for such a consolidation during the 1700s, when
most nobles freed their serfs—but kept the right to tax and receive a
portion of the farmers’ crops as a feudal obligation. “The German
nobility changed its attitude from being like the overseer—as they were
when the common people were serfs—to more of a landlord with tenants,”
says Kenneth Heger, a German history specialist and administrator with
the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). “This was a
change in outlook from running a really big farm to wanting to have a
lavish palace built.”
The
rulers of the remaining 39 states—who suddenly had much larger
territories—began looking at the bigger picture of what we now call
infrastructure: Roads, for example, had been poor because many
microstates were small enough to traverse in a day. Farms, too, were
generally small and inefficient. The nobles of the microstates
willingly gave up their sovereignty because “they didn’t lose their
personally owned lands and contracts for service— many ended up with
more clout as part of a larger state and a seat in the upper house of
that state’s legislature,” Heger says. And the aftereffects—better road
systems, more miles of railroads and the need for fewer farmers in the
1800s—helped spur massive emigration from German states in the
1800s.
You
can follow the splits and mergers of the German microstates through the
centuries in Gerhard Koelber’s Historische Lexikon.
Reviewing the records
Certain
genealogical guidelines apply to all German states—for one, church
records are the most helpful resource no matter the region or time
period in which you’re looking, and many of them have been microfilmed
by the Family History Library (FHL). You can see what’s available by
searching the
FHL catalog, then order
microfilm at your local Family History Center (
find a location near you with
our guide). Note that the FHL catalogs records according to
the political divisions of the German Empire of 1871, not today’s
jurisdictions. That means church records from areas across modern
Germany get filed as Prussian (not just the specifically named
provinces of East and West Prussia).
If
you need church records the FHL hasn’t filmed, try searching for
Protestant (or
Evangelisch in German) denominations at
Evangelical Church in Germany.
Consult Address Book for Germanic Genealogy and Ancestors in German
Archives (
details in our online toolkit) for information on Roman
Catholic archives.
The
German system of vital records, in place since 1876, has become even
more useful since the loosening of privacy laws. Das
Personenstandsrechtsreformgesetz—the Civil Registration
Reform Act—allows anyone to access records; previously, only
direct-line descendants could. New timelines make records available
after 110 years for births, 80 years for marriages and 30 years for
deaths. Learn more about the basics of German genealogy in the October
2004 Family Tree
Magazine.
Surveying the states
But
to get to that point, you need to know where to look—and that’s where
an understanding of the old German states comes in. Knowing the
regional particulars can aid your genealogical problem-solving. To get
you started, here’s a breakdown of the major historical states, along
with a little background, records coverage, immigration trends and
other peculiarities. When you search the FHL catalog, the entries
reflect the German state names given in parentheses here.
Prussia (Preußen): First and
foremost among the bygone German states is one that doesn’t appear on
the map at all today. Prussia’s rulers were from the Hohenzollern
family, which inherited Brandenburg (the area surrounding Berlin) and
later the Eastern European area called Prussia. Prussia became a
kingdom in 1701, and was the largest component of the German Empire
from 1871 to 1918. The Prussia of the 1800s was so large, in fact, that
pinpointing the origins of a person identified as “Prussian” in
American records can be tricky—the kingdom encompassed Pomerania,
Mecklenburg, Hannover, Westphalia and the Rhineland, among other
territories.
So
don’t be thrown for a loop if you encounter an ancestor who seems to
have been born in multiple regions. He or she might just have been
reacting to those changes and reporting a birthplace by its
then-current ownership rather than what it was called when he or she
was born.
Palatinate (Pfalz): This southwestern area
was the center of German immigration to America in the 1700s. For much
of its history, the Palatinate was tied to the rulers of Bavaria, which
leads to confusion because there’s a separate area in Bavaria called
the Upper Palatinate, or Oberpfalz. In addition to many microfilmed
church records, the FHL also has 18th century tax lists from Palatine
villages, some of which contain notations about emigrants. A copy of a
card file of emigrants is available at the
Pennsylvania
German Cultural Heritage Center at Kutztown
University.
Württemberg: This
longtime grand duchy—elevated to a kingdom in the 1800s—supplied
transplants to America in both the 18th- and 19th-century immigration
waves. If your ancestors came during the 1800s, you can search more
than 60,000 exit records in the Wuerttemberg Emigration Index on
Ancestry.com ($155.40 a year). These
records are also available in book and CD format. The index gives an
immigrant’s name, birth date and place, residence at time of
application, application date and an FHL microfilm number for the
original source material—which could include birth certificates, family
records, military releases and renunciations of citizenship
rights.
Hesse (Hessen): Virtually everyone’s
heard of the Hessians, the soldiers hired out by their rulers to fight
for the British in the Revolutionary War. In reality, only about half
of the German mercenary soldiers came from the state of Hesse-Kassel;
German princes from Brunswick, Waldeck, Ansbach-Bayreuth and
Anhalt-Zerbst also sold troops. About 5,000 of the 30,000 soldiers
stayed in North America, many simply joining the local German
populations. The
Johannes Schwalm Historical Association
studies these soldiers and their
descendants.
Ostfriesland and
Schleswig-Holstein: These two northern areas
(Ostfries-land borders the Netherlands, and Schleswig-Holstein adjoins
Denmark) are distinctive because Germans here used Scandinavian-style
patronymic naming systems as late as the mid-1800s. This method turns
the quest for ancestors’ names on its head. Normally, we can assume we
know the surname but not the first name of the individual’s father.
Patronymic surnames reveal the father’s first name. For example,
Henrich Petersen is the son of Peter Karlsen, who is the son of Karl
Petersen. The
American/Schleswig-Holstein Heritage
Society in Iowa has a 32,000-name database available to its
members.
Saxony and Thuringia (Sachsen and Thüringen): The first
question to ask is “Which one?” Thuringia was an exception to the
19th-century consolidation; it made up a dozen of the 39 German states
in the early 1800s. Even today, three of the 16 modern German states
have Saxony in their names—Lower Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Saxony. The
Arbeitsgemeinschaft
für Mitteldeutsche Familienforschung (Working
Group for Central German Family Research) is the leading organization
for these areas; the group publishes records and has an archive in
Leipzig.
Baden: Now united with
Württemberg, Baden was divided into two or more states for
much of its history. It became an enlarged grand duchy in 1771 when the
countryside united with the city of Baden (also called Baden-Baden).
Ancestry.com has a Baden emigration index similar to
Württemberg’s, though Baden’s doesn’t begin until 1866. If
your ancestor departed in the 1700s, you may find emigration records in
Werner Hacker’s Eighteenth Century Register of Emigrants from Southwest
Germany to America and Other Countries.
Bavaria
(Bayern): Bavaria weathered
centuries of inter-German wars and less-than-stable rulers (Mad King
Ludwig, anyone?). As an example of how deep a regard Bavarians have for
their history, they still refer to ethnic divisions in the state in
terms of tribes: The Old Bavarians (
Altbayern) occupy the eastern half of the
modern state, while the Franks (
Franken) occupy the northern districts, and
the southwestern Swabians (
Schwaben) became part of Bavaria only in the
early 19th century. Germany’s largest state in terms of geography is
also its most Roman Catholic area, but substantial numbers of
Protestants reside in the Franconian areas. You can find more
information on
Wikipedia.
Conquering the challenges
There’s
no doubt that Germany’s political history requires some study. Add that
to the challenge of needing to learn some German words—as well as
deciphering archaic scripts and typefaces—and it’s clear you’ve got
your work cut out for you. But for each test of your research skills,
the famous Teutonic thoroughness yields a solution. Remember, too, if
you do a
Google
search for a German-language Web site, you’ll have the option to
“Translate this page” when your search results come up.
Once
you have a village name—or some reasonable facsimile thereof—you’re
ready to consult
Meyers Orts-
und Verkehrs-Lexikon des Deutschen Reiches, a 1912
geographical and commercial gazetteer that’s the No. 1 source for
information about places in Germany. The gazetteer identifies a
community’s state, transportation and communication services,
population, churches and more. (
See our tips on using Ancestry.com's version.) All this information will help you paint a picture of
what your ancestor’s life was like in that German town of
yesteryear.
From the December 2009 Family Tree Magazine