Researching your Town or Area in Germany
If you do not know the name of your ancestral village in Germany:
- check out the Verein fur Computergenealogie website which is a tremendous resource for family research in Germany (albeit in German).
- http://www.ortsfamilienbuecher.de/ is a list of villages which have familybooks online
- http://gedbas.genealogy.net/: Fill in either Vorname(firstname) & Nachname(lastname) and click on "Suchen" to search for your ancestor and find the villages they lived in OR fill in "Ort (Stadt, Provinz, Land)" with your village name and click on "Suchen" to search for all the individuals in that village.
- http://www.adressbuecher.net/: Fill in your "Place" and click on "Search" to find all
- Rolf Fretag's website at http://www.rolf-freytag.de/ makes available for purchase a large number of German familybooks on CDROM (collections of families from German villages). His site is in German but you can find information on how to order CDROMs for shipment to America on this page. We would also suggest using the Google Translate to translate descriptions on his pages to your native language. He also provides links to indexes of surnames found on his CDROMs.
If you do know the name of your ancestral village in Germany:
- This link (https://www.familysearch.org/#form=catalog) on FamilySearch.org allows you to search the catalog of the LDS Family History Library (FHL) for "Place-names" to see what records are held by the FHL about a place.
- Searching for Place names in Germany: http://gov.genealogy.net/
This website will allow you how to query the GEO German place name locator. It is very complete and up to date. - Searching for Place names in Germany - Part 2: http://www.expedia.com/pub/agent.dll?qscr=mmfn
This is the MS Expedia site which includes the rest of the world as a bonus. Select "Search for a place", then set the Region to "Europe" and enter the place name you are searching for.
|