ROOTS & BRANCHES

Regina Kelly of Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, didn’t know she was going to be tipping me off to a new way of looking for German records on the mammoth genealogy website FamilySearch.org.

Kelly was using Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania’s FamilySearch Affiliate Library to access some records she couldn’t get from her home computer desktop (due to rights issues, some databases of FamilySearch are restricted to either Affiliate Libraries or the main FamilySearch Library in Salt Lake City) when she casually mentioned she’d made a breakthrough on one of her German lines just a short time ago.

Of course, it makes my ears prick up anytime someone tells me about a German breakthrough, and this turned out to be the case this time in ways I didn’t anticipate.

FamilySearch has some huge separate databases of German births, marriages, and deaths, most of which are drawn from church registers of the events that parallel the recordings of these vital dates—baptisms, marriages, and burials. They are one of my go-to sources when an immigrant’s place of birth in Germany is unknown since they have a large (but not complete) amount of records from all parts of the country.

If I know a particular village of origin, I then go to that village’s church registers as a first resort, looking them up in the online FamilySearch Catalog.

Kelly had told me her breakthrough had enabled her to trace the family of her great-great-grandmother Catharina Garrecht well into the 1700s. She mentioned that Mechtersheim in Palatinate was the village of origin.

When looked for the records of Mechtersheim in the FamilySearch Catalog, however, I noticed they only started in the early 1800s, so I was curious where Kelly had gotten the data on earlier events.

She graciously agreed to share the four generations of data she’d gleaned from various FamilySearch databases, and that really opened my eyes to another search technique.

Kelly had used some FamilySearch databases that are searchable compilations of church registers from particular regional German archives; in her case, the paydirt came from a database of Roman Catholic and Protestant church registers from the archive of Speyer in the Palatinate, as well as a database of just Catholic records from the Archdiocese of Freiburg in Baden (for generations further back, she had also used those large, Germany-wide databases, too).

It struck me that using these regional databases is a good intermediary step between looking at one village only or using only the massive birth, marriage, and death databases.

That’s because, in Kelly’s case, the records she found were actually not from Mechtersheim but from Heiligenstein, the local parish to which Mechtersheim was attached before going out on its own.

 To find a list of the dozens of such databases relating to Germany, do a search for “FamilySearch Historical Records.”