I'd like to talk about genealogy for a bit. In the process of gradually becoming my father, who was very much interested in family history, I started researching family genealogy about four years ago. However my focus was on my wife's family, whose mother immigrated from Germany to the US in 1958.
In the disruption following WW2 her German family lost track of each other and fell out of contact. We knew the name of my wife's mother and grandparents, and one great grandmother. That was all. With four years of work we've extended her family tree in Germany to identify almost all of the 5th great grandparents back to the early 1700s.
I write this from the perspective someone in the United States researching genealogy in Germany, trying to describe the resources I've used.
Publicly available records
Modern German civil recordkeeping started in about 1874, with a few portions of the country having started a bit earlier. Prior to 1874, all recordkeeping was done by the church: Lutheran being the largest denomination, but Evangelical Lutheran, Catholic, and Jewish records are all available.
Ancestry and FamilySearch have a sizable collection of German civil and church records digitized. Ancestry requires a paid account to access these records, FamilySearch requires an account to be created but it is free. Both have run character recognition on the records to make them searchable.
As a practical matter, Ancestry/FamilySearch/etc do not get yearly drops of new records from German authorities which have reached the threshold for release. Most publicly available records are those captured on microfiche by the LDS church over the last few decades; FamilySearch is owned by the LDS church. Newly released records sometimes appear but it is inconsistent and somewhat haphazard, and usually years after the privacy laws would allow release.
So one often needs to go to the source, not just rely on genealogy sites.
After 1874: Standesämter
A civil records office in Germany is called a Standesamt. They retain records according to the Personenstandsgesetzes (privacy laws, often abbreviated PStG):
- 110 years after a birth
- 80 years after a marriage
- 30 years after a death
After this, records are supposed to move from the Standesamt to an Archiv. Many large cities have their own archive, plus regional archives around major population centers, and then an archive at the state level like for Baden-Württemberg or Niedsersachen.
HOWEVER: in theory the documents move to an Archiv, in practice I find many documents remain at the Standesamt years or even decades beyond when they would be expected to move. I generally find the relevant Standesamt first and ask if they have the document. They will say if it has moved to an archive, and provide contact information for that archive.
- Searching for "Standesamt" plus the name of the municipality will often find it.
- Meyers Gazetteer can also be helpful in finding the Standesamt.
- If you can find a website for the Standesamt, look for "Urkundenservice" or, failing that, anything with "Urkunde" in the description. It will probably be further down on the list of options, it is much more common for people to want to register a new birth/marriage/etc with the Standesamt than it is to be looking for older documents.
- If your written German is not up to the task, use deepl.com to translate English and German. Its results are considerably more idiomatic than Google Translate.
Many Standesamt have a web order form which will allow you to pay using a credit card. If not you'll need to make the request via email, and expect to receive an invoice with an IBAN (the bank account number). You can use wise.com to transfer money from a US bank account, convert it to Euros, and send to the destination IBAN. wise.com fees are quite low.
The Standesamt will require proof of legitimate interest before releasing records earlier than the 110/80/30 years described above. Direct descendants have a legitimate interest, but may be required to prove it via a birth certificate, parents' marriage record and birth certificates, etc. English documents are usually ok for this, don't get them translated unless asked to do so. If a document does require translation I've relied on Annika Romero at https://germangeek.com/ for several such translations.
If not a direct descendant, one won't be able to order documents less than 110/80/30 years old. Older documents at the Archiv, and even if still at the Standesamt but older than the privacy laws protect, will be released upon request.
Standesamt Document options
The Standesamt typically offers a few options:
- A birth record is a Geburtsurkunde, marriage is a Heiratsurkunde or Eheregister, a death record is a Sterbeurkunde.
- By default an A4 paper form will be sent in the mail. This is slightly larger than US Letter sized paper.
- An A5 option means a smaller paper, with holes for mounting in a memory album called a Familienstammbuch.
- Mehrsprachiger, often labeled "International" means the form will be labeled in multiple languages. This is useful for official proceedings in countries outside of Germany, but otherwise it costs extra and I wouldn't bother with it.
- An Abschrift aus dem Register is a photocopy of the original record exactly as it is, not transcribed into a modern format.
It is often useful to order the Abschrift aus dem Register, which will be handwritten before the mid 1950s. The original registers were frequently annotated in the margins with the dates of marriages, of death, and sometimes even of the birth of children (though this is not common).
For example, on the left is a Geburtsurkunde Standard for my wife's maternal grandmother. It is very brief, only the essential details are copied out of the original register entry. A large "Kopie" appears across it because certified originals are printed on a holographic paper, scanning or copying reveals the hologram. The paper form we received in the mail does not have a visible "Kopie" on it.
On the right is an Abschrift aus dem Geburtenregister, where in the lower left one can see an annotation of her death in Hannover. It is somewhat hit-or-miss: there is no annotation of her marriage, even though it also took place in Hannover. Nonetheless these annotations can be extremely helpful in locating more documents to find further information.
Before 1874: Kirchenbücher
Before 1874, you'll be searching Church books called Kirchenbücher. Ancestry and FamilySearch also have a good collection of these upon which they have run character recognition to make them searchable.
Archion has an even larger collection of Lutheran and Evangelical church books, but they have not been indexed using character recognition so you cannot search for a name. If you know the place and date, Archion can be very helpful in obtaining the record. If you do not know the city and rough date, Archion will not help. Archion access is paid, typically for a month of access at a time for about 20 Euros.
Matricula has a large collection of Catholic church books. Similarly, they have not been run through character recognition and are not searchable, but they are available for free.
Records will be handwritten, and very frequently use a lettering called Kurrentschrift. One gets used to it, at least enough to recognize the family name, and Reddit's /r/Kurrent can help transcribe difficult records.
In all cases though, church or civil, the recordkeeping is distributed through towns and regions. There is no central records store, you just have to know where their records would be in order to send your inquiry to the right place. Digitizing and making the records searchable is starting to change this and make records more discoverable, but only for relatively old records which Ancestry and FamilySearch have had for a while.
Census data
Genealogy in the US greatly relies on the decadal census, which might not be complete nor entirely accurate but is on the whole an amazing resource to have. There is nothing like this in Germany.
There are occasional census efforts in some of the German states, but not very often and mostly not made publicly available. One of the few exceptions is the Jewish portion of the 1938/1939 census, often referred to as the Minority Census, which was made available for its historical significance and for the benefit of descendants of families persecuted during this time. The non-Jewish portions of the 1938/1939 census were collected but remain in registry offices throughout the country and are not accessible.
There is, however, the Melderegister. Where the US mostly relies on driver's license databases in each state to know where its citizens reside, Germany requires an explicit registration after moving called an Anmeldung. The collection of registrations for a city are the Melderegister, and it may contain information about marriages and children born in addition to where the family lived over the years. The Melderegister of direct ancestors can sometimes be obtained by writing to the Bürgeramt of the city, however they are not retained forever and each city determines its own policies. Archiving Melderegister entries after 55 years and destroying them some time later is a common choice.
DNA Matches
In the last couple decades, DNA sequencing has advanced tremendously and is commercially available from a number of providers like Ancestry and MyHeritage. We have found more DNA matches to German relatives via MyHeritage, which has a larger presence in Europe. Nonetheless we submitted DNA tests for both. Note that MyHeritage allows upload of DNA data downloaded from Ancestry, so one doesn't need to buy another test kit but does need to pay for an account with access to DNA matches.
Colophon
We visited Germany in July of 2024, to meet several cousins we'd found. The initial discovery was via a DNA match, but the hook to get us talking was the family tree and genealogy. The family had lost contact with each other and we're slowly rediscovering them.
Researching the family tree was also a step for my wife and our children to claim German citizenship via a declaration process called StAG 5. Prior to 1975 citizenship was not automatically passed on by German mothers, only German fathers, but for 10 years 2021-2031 Germany is allowing descendants of German mothers to declare their citizenship by presenting sufficient proof of descent. If this process is of interest, Reddit's /r/GermanCitizenship can be a useful resource.
A subsequent blog post, Getting Started with German Genealogy, gives specific examples of how we got started with our German family research.
