RLP 162: Tracing 19th Century Germans Part 3

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 162: Tracing 19th century Germans part three.

Diana (48s):
Hi, Nicole, how are you doing today?

Nicole (50s):
Doing great. And I’ve been watching the lectures that were recorded from the latest Institute course that I took. Just trying to catch up on any parts that I’ve missed. It was at IGHR – the Institute of Genealogical and Historical Research. It was the advanced DNA evidence course, and we heard from a lot of guest lectures that I hadn’t heard before, like Michael Laccapo and Kimberly Powell. And it was really good. Karen Stanbary and Paul Woodbury, were the other instructors and David Rencher. And I really gained a lot from Karen Stanbary’s visual phasing lecture. That was fun. I watched that again really slowly and took really careful notes and made a plan for how I can start working on visual phasing, even just because I want to understand how to do it.

Nicole (1m 35s):
And I have the three brothers already to go in GEDMatch. So why not try a couple of chromosomes?

Diana (1m 40s):
Oh, that’s awesome. Yeah. I remember studying that chapter in advanced genetic genealogy a few times to really understand it. And when I did the DNA practicum last fall, the advanced practicum Karen’s case did have some practice official phasing. And so then I looked at that again, but I didn’t really have time in that week to dive into it. So I am so curious to see how you do it and then what you find that’d be really neat.

Nicole (2m 7s):
Yeah. Yeah. The main takeaway I got from the lecture is that, you know, although you can do segment mapping at DNA painter, you’re not always going to have the whole chromosome mapped out. You’ll just have the matches that you’ve found. And so with visual phasing, you can use some of the matches that you don’t have the negative space inference and logic to help you map out most of the whole chromosome and figure out which of the four grandparents that came from for each of your three testers. So it really gives you more to compare against when you get an unknown match,

Diana (2m 39s):
Right? Cause then you take what the exact segment that they met you on, and then you look at your chromosome map and then you can say, oh wow, it’s that line?

Nicole (2m 48s):
Yeah. So how are you doing and what is up with you?

Diana (2m 52s):
Well, last week at IGHR, I took Tom Jones course on writing and that was fabulous. And I set the goal that I to submit an article to the NGSQ one of my past research projects and get it all written up and approve argument form. I have some good research that I’ve done that I would like to submit, but I realized that I need to rewrite it in a different form because right now it’s in a report form and I need to get into approve argument format. So the course was great because it just basically laid it all out clearly for what we need to do. And I learned so many good tips on better writing. You know, I think we should never rest easy with our abilities and always am trying to improve.

Diana (3m 33s):
And I learned a lot about becoming a better writer. It was great.

Nicole (3m 37s):
Oh, fantastic. I’m excited about your goal. I have that goal too, but I think I’m going to wait until after I do my portfolio, which keeps getting kind of pushed off as I keep having the things come up, but I’m working on it slowly. We’ll get there some announcements. We still have a few spots left in our DNA study group this fall. So if you would like to join us, we’d love to have you. And then we also have been working on planning for 2022. We are switching the order that we do the study groups. So instead of having the Research Like a Pro with DNA study group in the fall, again, we’re moving that to the spring. So that means we’re going to have two DNA study groups back to back.

Nicole (4m 20s):
So we’ll have the one this fall and then another one, the spring. And then the traditional Research Like a Pro study group will be next fall in 2022. And the reason we’re doing that is just because there’s not quite as much time in the fall because of the holidays to finish the DNA study group. And it’s just kind of a longer one. There’s 12 to 13 weeks for that one. So we’re going to put it in the spring when there’s a little more time.

Diana (4m 44s):
Yeah, I think that’ll be really wise when you’ve gone through the whole thing. You want to finish up with a good strong finish and we just found people start to get a little stressed out about the holidays coming up. So this will be a good switch. All right. Well, today we have got Heidi Mathis with us again, and we’re going to talk more about term blog posts series tracing your 19th century German ancestors. This has been such a fun blog post series and podcast series. So welcome Heidi. It’s good to be back. Can we just kind of review for our listeners

Heidi Mathis (5m 21s):
In the, in the past blog posts and podcasts, we went over German history and we went over looking for every possible US-based record. And then we also, we went over steps for learning to read German language records. And today we’re finally going to take our virtual trip to Germany and learn how to use German based records. And we’re going to keep using our example person who’s Burkhardt Schlag who’s my third great-grandfather. And we’re going to be looking at the German genealogy mega site called CompGen.de. It also goes by genealogy.net, and we’re going to be trying to locate German genealogical societies, German state archives, or Ortssippen books OFBs relevant to our German ancestor.

Heidi Mathis (6m 9s):
And we’re also going to use, CompGen.de has an amazing section for looking at the jurisdictions of our Germans hometown. And one last thing I want to include is that I’m going to be using some German terms in this podcast, and I do not speak German. And so I want to apologize in advance for just incorrect pronunciations. So apologize to all you German speakers out there.

Diana (6m 34s):
Well, you’re going to be much better than me because I don’t even have a clue how to say that I’ve been working on my French. I could have done some French, but, and with a surname of Schultz, you know, I shouldn’t, I should have taken German. Right? I do have that German heritage. It’s never too late. Nope. It’s not after I get my French down.

Nicole (6m 52s):
All right. Well, thanks for that recap, Heidi. So let’s talk next about the case where our us research has helped us discover the hometown of our German ancestor, which is always so exciting. What are kind of the first steps when you have that hometown?

Heidi Mathis (7m 6s):
Well, that is like the holy grail is to find that German ancestor’s hometown. And if you found that, then you’re going to want to check in American based German church books. And those can be found at Ancestry, but especially at FamilySearch. And so you’re going to want to just scour that to the best of your ability, just remembering that not everything is index. So you’re going to want to remember that you might have to be flipping electronically through some pages, but if you have looked and you cannot find your particular hometown on the American based searches, another thing you can do is to try Meyers Gazetteer, which we talked about in an earlier episodes, what you do is, you know, you type in your ancestor’s hometown and you click under eccliestical and it will show you a list of churches that were nearest by religion.

Heidi Mathis (7m 60s):
And so you could also search for nearby villages in that way. So if you’ve done that and you still cannot find your Germans church books with the next place to look is on the German online services. And yet you’ve got to remember that not every German church record still exists and not every existing record is online yet, but many have survived in our online. So you’re going to want to check. There are two German based online church record sets to that. You want to check there’s the entirely Protestant one called Archion.de and that does cost. It’s like $20 for a month. It’s well worth it.

Heidi Mathis (8m 40s):
And even before you start searching that one, you can check to see if your village is on there for free. That’s nice because you only have to pay if you know, your records are there. And then if you have Catholic ancestors, the other site is called that’s what we’re going to be looking at. So I did look for, for my ancestor, Burkhart Schlage, and I didn’t find him in Ancestry or FamilySearch, but I did find his church records on Archion. However, sadly, when I got to those records on of Züntersbach, finally, I noticed that the baptism started in June of 1830, which was three months later, then Burkhardt’s birthday.

Heidi Mathis (9m 22s):
His birthday was in March of 1830. So he was not going to be found in the book. So like I said, I went back to a Meyers Gazetteer and I found that Oberzell was a village that was close to Züntersbach with the Lutheran church. And I started looking through Oberzell and I just noticed that there were just almost no flags in that, that one. And that’s kind of always a helpful sign. Like if you are seeing, you’re getting into a church book and you’re just not seeing your ancestors surname at all, it’s definitely a strong hint that that’s probably not the correct place. And it wasn’t for me. I didn’t find Burkhart or his family in Oberzell. I needed another strategy.

Nicole (10m 3s):
Wow. That was good. That’s really good that you went back and tried to find another village. I think a lot of us would have just given up after finding that the BR the baptisms didn’t begin before our ancestors birth date, but that’s so smart to go and find nearby villages to see if they would have recorded the baptism in another church, you know, but unfortunately you didn’t find it. So that’s so sad. So let me recap the suggestion. So start with the US-based databases at Ancestry anFamilySearch. And then if you don’t find it there, you can try the German based databases Archion and Matricula.

Heidi Mathis (10m 41s):
Exactly. And just keep going back to Meyers because it just helpfully lists your village and then the nearest churches and the distance away by religion as well. You definitely have a great resource in Meyers.

Diana (10m 57s):
That sounds like such a great gazetteer. I am just wishing we had that for every locality that we researched,

Heidi Mathis (11m 4s):
How often it’s definitely, you get kind of spoiled in some ways in this.

Diana (11m 8s):
So, and I think you pointed out something really helpful that you have to know when the records started being kept, you know, these churches when they spring up. Oh, and they started keeping records and that that’s going to help you to figure things out. So you mentioned that there’s another strategy when you just don’t find your guy where you think he should be. And I’m kind of guessing that that’s what I do in my Southern research, which is I start looking for the FAN club, those friends, associates and neighbors is, does that apply to German research as well?

Heidi Mathis (11m 38s):
Most definitely. So I was lucky in this case, I had noticed that there were other Schlags associated with Burkhart in his St. Louis locality here in the US. One was buried in his plot and a few others Burkhart’s children had had a business with some of these younger Schlags. And so, you know, I hypothesized that it’s possible that these were potentially Burkhart’s nieces and nephews. And so I kept researching these younger Schlags and I found some great newspaper articles for them and was able to kind of start to understand that their relationships, then I started noticing that there was a DNA connection between their descendants and my dad and my aunt.

Heidi Mathis (12m 24s):
And so that was really exciting to see that. So what I did was I started researching these younger Schlags. They had their birth dates, and one of them had a death certificate where they listed that their parents were John Schlag and Elizabeth Zirkle. And so I started looking in Archion for these younger Schlags, and I just often it’s amazing German birth dates are really accurate. So all I had to do was go to the Züntersbach church books on Archion. And I was, I found all of them, you know, just chronologically basically. And so that was really exciting to find that, and they all had the same parents.

Heidi Mathis (13m 6s):
And so I started to look for a marriage record for John Schlag and Elizabeth Zirkle. And I found one of Johannes Schlag and Elizabethan Zirkle, and I found their marriage in 1859. So it was after that 1830 cutoff for me. And it, because German records can often be so good, it listed both of the bride and groom’s parents. So, you know, just my theory was that Johannes and Burkhart were brothers. And so it listed that Johannes , his parents were Heinrich Schlag and Elizabeth Mueller. And so I was able, because this was such a small village, I was kind of able to find kind of the structure of this family, helpfully, there’s often a family number in there, and I think it’s like an address.

Heidi Mathis (13m 54s):
And that’s how you can kind of tell that the Schlags that you’re looking at are yours. Anyway, I was able to kind of confirm like a family for Heinrich Schlag and Elizabeth Mueller. And then that way I never got direct proof that they were Burkhart’s parents, but I, I had an inference through DNA and through records that Burkhart’s brother was Johannes Schlag. And so that I could at least theorize that Heinrich Schlag and Elizabeth Mueller were the parents of my Burkhart.

Diana (14m 24s):
Oh, that’s great. So you think that there really was no baptism record that survived for him? Exactly.

Heidi Mathis (14m 30s):
I think that there is a, you know, just like any other place, there’s a lot of destruction of records. I imagine there once was a record for Burkhart, but you know, so many wars in Germany, you know, there’s just a lot of destruction, but there it’s amazing how much remains.

Diana (14m 46s):
Right? So by connecting the family that you found in the United States with the same surname and this place that you had researched and knew that he was from, you were able to put it all together. And that’s great that you’ve got the DNA too. We’re going to talk about that in the next episode, but isn’t it wonderful to have that confirmation?

Heidi Mathis (15m 8s):
Oh, I was so excited. You know, how you have an ancestor and some of them you feel more connected to, or you just kind of fall in love with, and for some reason, I just have fallen in love with Burkhart. And so I was really excited to be able to get some answers on him.

Nicole (15m 25s):
Well, great job, finding those FAN club members in the U S and keeping track of them. So that when you got to this point in your research, you had some other clues and some other people to look up, and I felt really lucky in this case. So what if you’re having a hard time finding the parish records for your ancestor? Are there some other things you can do?

Heidi Mathis (15m 44s):
Yeah. I mean, sometimes you’re going to find the village of your ancestor, but you’re just not going to be able to find them on line, like in Archion or in Matricula. So here’s a couple things you can try before you just give up and start knocking on doors in Germany. You can try looking for what’s called an OFB, and that stands for Ortsfamilienbücher and, or it’s a town family book. And that those have been put together from civil records from church records, by just local people who are interested in genealogy and they put together these wonderful books.

Heidi Mathis (16m 26s):
And so those are sometimes online sometimes in print. And so if you could find one of those for your village, you’re, you’re definitely home free. So you want to check that before you give up and you later, we’re going to talk about how to look for those. And then also another thing to definitely try, and this actually worked for me in, and in a different case, was contacting a local German genealogical society in the area where you know your ancestor was from. I had a situation where I did have an ancestor I knew where they were from because of great American German records and their church books were just not online anywhere. And there was no OFBs, but I actually contacted the German genealogical society there and they were so nice.

Heidi Mathis (17m 12s):
And they put me in contact with this very wonderful man called Uva, who was putting together an OFB for the area. And he just went to town on my ancestors and just sent me all this great information. So you do definitely want to try those German genealogy societies.

Nicole (17m 30s):
That’s great. Did you just email them or call them and did they speak English? I’m guessing?

Heidi Mathis (17m 34s):
Well, actually I had met a woman at the German genealogical conference. We, it just got over with it’s the international German Genealogical Conference. And in 2019, they had a booth for the area that my, this ancestor was from. And so I actually got to talk to her in person and she did speak English and I did write to her in English. And so actually FamilySearch, and I included this in the blog was, has a, a way to write letters in German to people. And so what I often do is, is I write in English and then I try to translate it in, you know, by using Google translate in German on the page, just in case I’m talking to someone who doesn’t speak English and just to be polite.

Heidi Mathis (18m 21s):
But in this case, this woman did speak English and she was, oh, she was so helpful. Couldn’t have been more helpful. So you just never know. And also by contacting them, they may be able to put you in touch with somebody who’s local, who you could pay to do some of this research.

Nicole (18m 40s):
That’s so great to have a connection like that, and to just kind of have a way to get a little more help on, on the ground.

Heidi Mathis (18m 47s):
Oh, absolutely. Especially when it’s another country and you just kind of have no idea what, you know, the lay of the land is

Diana (18m 55s):
That is really great. And it’s fun to know that genealogy societies are not just limited to the United States. Right?

Heidi Mathis (19m 1s):
Absolutely. And I just, I was in that conference and I had another great experience with getting in touch with somebody from a, yet another place in Germany. And I have to say they were so friendly and helpful. Sometimes Germans are tracing their ancestors that, you know, their more distant relatives who immigrated to the United States. And so there’s kind of a fun connection there.

Diana (19m 25s):
Oh, I hadn’t even thought about that. So you can have some give and take helping back and forth. So that’s neat. Absolutely. So what else is there available online? We can’t make it to Germany right now. Are there some other things that we can do online?

Heidi Mathis (19m 40s):
Okay, absolutely. Well, I’d like to talk now about this amazing web salt call it. Scott goes by a bunch of different names, but CompGen.de is one, and it has a GenWiki page. And it also, like I said before, it goes under genealogy.net as well. But basically this is a huge website for that Germans are using today to research their own ancestors. And so it’s kind of similar to the research Wiki on FamilySearch, but the challenge is, of course it’s all in German and there is an English version, but it, it just doesn’t have as much information.

Heidi Mathis (20m 21s):
So what I do is I, I get up the same page in two different windows in Chrome, and you can, you know, right. Click with Chrome and it can translate the page. And so I’ll have one page translated in English, but I’ll keep the other page up in German just to, you know, follow through what’s going on because sometimes for some reason, Chrome will just switch you to the English page. And so you won’t really know it. So that’s why I keep those two up. And plus it also helps me with just starting to learn how to navigate the site and respond to the German terms instead of just the English ones in this.

Heidi Mathis (21m 2s):
I’m going to be talking a little bit about just four parts of this really big and kind of scary website for an English speaker. And I watched this really great webinars from Legacy Family Tree by Teresa Steinkamp McMillin. And so I just, if you are going to dive into this website and you just feel overwhelmed, I would definitely recommend her webinar on a Legacy Family Tree. So in my blog post, I talked about four different tabs, basically on this GenWiki page that are worth dipping your toe into for a beginner. And this is definitely where I have started. So the first one are those OFBs or Ortsfamilienbücher that are on GenWiki.

Heidi Mathis (21m 45s):
And let me back up and say that I’m going to go over OFBs and then Vereine, which is genealogical societies, what we were talking about. And then this other tab called GOV, which is a Gazeteer like Meyers only, instead of it only being from one year it’s like Myers is kind of frozen in time. This GOV tab shows you the history of the jurisdictions of your village. So it’s kind of amazing. And then the last tab we’ll go over is called the regional tab. And that kind of gets you into the different German archives.

Diana (22m 21s):
Wow. That is so cool to know that there’s this amazing website and I’m looking at it and just thinking, this is really a must. If you’re going to do German genealogy, you’ve got to learn how to navigate it. And I know sometimes it can be a challenge when you come to these types of online databases or sometimes for the United States, we have an archive catalog that just looks like Greek to us over when we’re trying to navigate it. So I know from experience, it’s worthwhile to learn how to do it, and I’m glad you’re going to walk us through it. And that you have identified some of the most important things to look at because there is a lot going on on this website.

Heidi Mathis (23m 3s):
It is a little forboding, isn’t it?

Diana (23m 7s):
Well, it’s beautiful. It’s just a lot.

Nicole (23m 10s):
Well, let’s start with the first two parts of GenWiki that you talked about, the OFBs and the Verina.

Heidi Mathis (23m 16s):
So the OFBs, our first, we have to keep in mind that there are only a small portion of the OFPs are actually been put online. And so this part of GenWiki is going to just show us a portion of those. So if you want to see if your villages is online, you’ll go to the GenWiki site and you’ll click the OFB tab that’s at the top. And you just want to remember that they’re organized by German state. As an example, I used Burkhart’s wife, her, her name was Christina Reckermon, and she was from a village in Westfalia and her village was called Nordhemorin.

Heidi Mathis (23m 59s):
And it had associated villages called Hila and Holland and Harttomb. And so I looked under the north Rhine-Westphalia part of this OFB tab, and I did not find any of her localities there. And so I knew that her OFB was not, has not been put online yet, but I didn’t look in the FamilySearch catalog. And I did find the Harttomb. I think it was the Harttomb OFB was there and she’s in, in that one. And so, as an example, I also look for bird cards to see if there was an, an OFB for Burkhardt. And I looked under his state and Züntersbach was I think, a really tiny place.

Heidi Mathis (24m 42s):
And so I, I have a feeling there’s never been anyone that’s put together an OFB for his village. So that was kind of a bummer for me, but that’s, that’s, you know, not going to be uncommon. And then a second tab you can look at is the Verina tab, and that’s the German word for society or club under this tab. You’re just going to see a list of the existing German genealogical societies. And he just kind of have to work with that and experiment with it. Before I knew this tab was around, I had tried Googling German words for genie, you know, genealogy, or, you know, the, the area that actually Christine was from.

Heidi Mathis (25m 25s):
And I just had zero luck actually coming upon a German genealogical society. So the fact that this tab is here is, is fantastic because you can click through these and just figure out which one is goes to what part of Germany that would be great. Cause then you can, can start exploring their website and figuring it out to the best of your ability. And if you get stuck, you can try emailing them and seeing if they can, they can help you.

Nicole (25m 53s):
That’s fantastic. I’m just looking at the website now and it’s translated into English. And so it’s Germany, genealogical associations, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Diana (26m 3s):
That’s great. What about looking for specific archives or jurisdictions? I know those can be tricky knowing which government body was in charge at what time. So does GenWiki.de help us with that?

Heidi Mathis (26m 16s):
Yeah. Yes, Absolutely. This other really amazing tab that is on GenWiki and it’s called the GOV tab and that’s also along the top. So just as I was saying before that Meyer’s Gazetteer is fantastic, but it is telling you the jurisdictions that were there somewhere before 1912 and it stops there, but this is GOV tab on GenWiki. If you click on that and it there’ll be a search box that says Orts and that means place in German. And so you put in your village and you’ll be able to hopefully navigate to your village, and then it will show you this kind of flow chart of your villages jurisdictions over time.

Heidi Mathis (27m 6s):
And so in that way, you can get a clue as to where you might be needing to look to find archives for your village. Again, I wish that every place I looked had at like a, a place that you could go to find the history of your localities jurisdictions, wouldn’t that be amazing? And then the last tab I talked about in the, in the blog post was the regional tab and that’s at the top and it’s a little bit harder to describe online, but I showed in the blog post, how you could navigate to the basic, the various state archives.

Heidi Mathis (27m 47s):
There are 16 states in Germany and you can get to their state’s archives. And it’s just fun to click around on those and see what’s available there. That Germany has an few national archives and the overall national archives are called Bundesarchiv. And that would be like our national archives in Washington DC. But these states archives is art will be the next level, and it’s very equivalent to, you know, looking in Missouri, you know, and, and those archives are going to be much more specific if you were looking for people in Missouri and it’s the same in Germany. And then you want to also try to remember that there will be archives that are even more local than that.

Heidi Mathis (28m 27s):
And you’ll probably have to find those at least, I don’t know how to find those except through contacting German genealogical societies. I also wanted to mention, so I talked about how you can use GenWiki to find these German state archives, but there’s a couple of other ways you can find it. FamilySearch has a Wiki page for the German archives and libraries with clickable links, and also there’s a German Wikipedia page. So you have to look on the Wikipedia.de and look for the term Staatz archive. And that’s S T A A T S A R C H I V. And if you put that into the German Wikipedia, they’ll, it’ll get to the scrape page where they’ll give you a clickable links to all 16 of the German archives.

Heidi Mathis (29m 15s):
And I just highly recommend playing around with that and seeing what you can learn.

Diana (29m 20s):
Well, as she had been talking about this, I’ve just really been thinking about the value of a locality guide for this German research you’re for whatever specific village or area that you are researching, because it would be impossible to keep all of this in your head. You would have to be writing all this down and having all these links. And I can’t even imagine trying to do this without formulating a really great locality guide.

Heidi Mathis (29m 42s):
Absolutely. It’s, it’s so important. And this website, if you can learn GenWiki provides you some great, it’s almost already a locality guide for some of these things, but it, it would be good to make your own for sure.

Diana (29m 55s):
Well, you could at least have a link to that, right. In case you lose where you found it. Cause sometimes I’ll do that. I’ll be clicking around and I’ll find a great site. And then if I come back and I haven’t recorded that anywhere, I can’t find it as quickly. I can’t find it again. I think we’ve all done that. And it’s so frustrating. So do that all the time. Yeah. It’s good to just keep track of where you’ve been and get all the help to research areas much as you research the records, learning about what to do. Well, thank you so much, Heidi. This has been really fun to talk all about actually tackling some research within Germany using the online sources. Yeah.

Heidi Mathis (30m 32s):
I just wanted to be able to provide like a beginning for myself and for others, you know, just realizing that it isn’t as scary as we may think to be able to get some really great answers because German records are really good and we don’t want to like take ourselves out of the game just because it’s in another language.

Diana (30m 53s):
Yeah. All right.

Nicole (30m 54s):
Well, fantastic. You Heidi. And we’ll talk to you guys again next week. Thank you.

Diana (31m 0s):
All right. Bye. Bye everyone.

Nicole:
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