ROOTS & BRANCHES

 Last week’s “Roots & Branches” column included the welcome news about Dirk Weissleder that he had shared recently.

He’s the chair of the German genealogy umbrella organization DAGV and the second vice president for the International German Genealogy Partnership and has become the first German to be elected as general secretary of the World Federation of Genealogy and Heraldry (known by its French initials CIGH for Confédération Internationale de Généalogie et d`Héraldique).

The federation, founded in 1971, has the aim of international exchange, networking and cooperation between groups in the fields of genealogical and heraldic research and studies.

Weissleder again reached out to the international genealogical community in the last week, but it wasn’t in the same vein, unfortunately.

This time, he had the unfortunate responsibility to inform the worldwide German genealogy community about the untimely death of 72-year-old Rolf Masemann, a member of his DAGV board and chairman of the Bremerhaven genealogy group known as colloquially as Die Maus (formally, Gesellschaft für Familienforschung e.V. Bremen)

Masemann led the inquiry office of the DAGV umbrella association with great commitment.

I had the occasion to meet Masemann in June when he took part in the International German Genealogy Partnership’s conference in Sacramento, California, and gave a special presentation during the conference’s leadership day.

As the No. 1 person handling inquiries for the German genealogy consortium, Masemann had a number of tips that he believed would enhance the flow of such correspondence between America and Germany.

Delivered with a certain sense of wit and dripping in irony, his top recommendation was to avoid sending an inquiry stating that you’re looking for an ancestor named “Johann Schmidt” (which literally means “John Smith” in German) from “somewhere in Germany.”

Those of us in attendance from U.S.-based groups took it to heart we needed to redouble our efforts at educating genealogists that finding a village of origin is often vital to finding records on the German side since so many documents are accessed locally.

There are no shortage of potential American records listing the European village of origin—but some are easier to find than others. Still, if you haven’t looked for naturalization records (both first and final papers) as well as obituaries from German-language newspapers (not to mention church records of baptisms, marriages and deaths for the immigrant and all children), you haven’t done enough “due diligence” to ask for help from Germany.

After Weissleder sent out the word about Masemann on the German Partnership’s e-mail list, condolences begin to pour in from around the world.

Many echoed Germany-based genealogist Wolfgang Grams: “It makes me very sad to realize that seeing Rolf at the Sacramento conference was the last time we had a chance to chat.”