The first talk I attended was Sources and Structures for Successful Genealogical Research in Germany by Dirk Weissleder. This presentation covered primary sources such as church and state registers. Civil registrations in Germany didn't start until 1874. Prior to that church registers are the primary source of information for German researchers. In the lack of primary sources many researchers have to rely on secondary sources such as tax lists, court documents, address and telephone directories, and town or village chronicles. Other sources of information can include Ortsfamilienbuecher (village family books), and Leichenpredigten (Protestant) and Totenzettel (Catholic) which include funeral cards and funeral mass records. More records are going online at various sites including compgen.de. You might even get lucky searching the Familienkundliche Literaturdatanbank at http://famlit.genealogy.net.
Marc Jarzebowski presented How to find German Church Records on the Internet. His talk focused on the two major sites for German church records - Archion for Protestant records, and Matricula for Catholic records. Archion has been able to digitize at least part of all but three of the regional churches in Germany. Bremen, Schaumburg-Lippe and the Reformed Church are not included in the Archion collection. Matricula, on the other hand, is not as complete for Germany, with only five diocese being partially represented in its collections. However, Matricula does cover additional countries including Austria, Poland, Serbia and Luxembourg. If you are lucky enough to find records on Matricula, you will not be able to download them. Another difference is that Archion is a subscription site while Matricula is free. As a note, church records found in the state archives are usually the duplicate records while those found on Archion and Matricula are the original records. These original records may include notes that are not present on the duplicates. If you find the duplicate records but can't find the record on these two sites, you will know which parish they came from and can request a copy of the original record from that parish.
Public Records in Germany in 19th Century - Standes- and Zivilstandsregister by Roland Geiger was also a very interesting talk. He went into detail about what information can be found in various record types. One of the interesting bits of information he mentioned was that civil marriages were required even if someone was married in a church. This resulted in two sets of records for the marriage which may have different dates for the marriage event. He also mentioned that civil records are not always held in the local town, they may be in nearby towns or regional archives. This could cause problems if you are trying to research in the local archives.
The last talk of the day was Getting Started with German Family History Research by Ursula Krause. Ursula is a Progenealogist with Ancestry. She provided a sponsored talk to discuss the resources available on Ancestry for German research. There were a couple things that she said all German researchers need to be aware of in their research. One was that the boundaries have changed over time, from independent cities and states to the consolidated Germany. Another thing that we need to be aware of is that religions might change in an area based on who was ruling. These changes may result in records being found somewhere other than where we expect to find them. We also need to be aware of name variations and how first names may be abbreviated. For example Freiderich may be abbreviated Fred. or Fr. or could be spelled Freiderik. Additionally, some records, such as passenger records from Bremen, were destroyed so it could be difficult to find some of the records we need in our research.
These presentations will help me to increase my success in researching my German ancestors. However, German records were only a portion of the presentations given today. There were many other topics including Irish, DNA, Italian, Chinese, Scottish and others on the schedule for today.
The keynote talks were by Steve Rockwood, CEO of FamilySearch; Tamsin Todd, CEO of FindMyPast; and Kadeena Cox, British Paralympian. Kadena talked about her mother's life growing up in Jamaica and immigration to England. Kadeena was a promising Olympian until her stroke at the age of 23. After her stroke she continued to train for the Olympics and then was diagnosed with MS. Now she competes in the Paralympics and will be participating in the Paralympics World Games in in Dubai in November. Tamsin Todd spoke about a few new collections at FindMyPast including the 1921 UK Census, additions to the British Newspaper Archive, and tree-to-tree matching. The entertainment was provided by Tre Amici.
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| Tre Amici at RootsTech London. |
Tomorrow is the final day of RootsTech London. I hope everyone has a great day and learned something new while they were here or watching the live broadcasts of classes.
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