ROOTS & BRANCHES

My friend and fellow International German Genealogy Partnership board member Dirk Weissleder, a German and international family history leader, gave greetings to his American colleagues during last week’s Fourth of July holiday by posing questions on U.S. research.

The nut of his inquiry was quintessentially German: asking for where and how to find systematic listings of some of the major U.S. record groups for finding data about immigrants. Weissleder is engaged in trying to research some 40 families with his surname who came to American between 1837 and 1951.

Even though I’m centuries and generations removed from Germany, some of that Teutonic thoroughness has rubbed off on me because one of the philosophical questions I often pose about records I find online is whether I truly have seen all of those records or just those that have been digitized.

Weissleder posed four questions about American record groups and where the find the most systematic listings of them: the passenger arrival lists at ports of entry; federal and state censuses; vital records from civil authorities and churches; other record groups that may help determine a specific place of origin for immigrants.

One of our fellow board members Nancy Myers recommended the articles on the ever-growing FamilySearch Wiki, a true encyclopedia of genealogy, and Gordon Seyffert, another person involved with the German Partnership, pointed out the categorized entries on Cyndi’s List of Genealogy Sites on the Internet.

These are both good sources of information. Here are some of my recommendations for resources for the categories about which Weissleder inquired:

• For the ports of entry, I find subscription-service Ancestry.com to be the best resource with good scans of the records. In addition to the arrivals at the U.S. ports, Ancestry also has the Hamburg embarkation lists, especially important because so many German emigrants left from this port and the exit lists often have more information than their American arrival counterparts.
• For censuses in America, all of the Federal censuses can be found on a multitude of free and pay sources—FamilySearch.org, Ancestry.com, MyHeritage.com—but the state censuses are more idiosyncratic. For a list of all of them, I had to go to the venerable staple of American research, The Source: A Guidebook to American Genealogy, for its chapter on censuses that includes a table on state censuses (although it inexplicably and erroneously notes for Pennsylvania “No record of an applicable state census has been found”—guess the authors didn’t known about the commonwealth’s Septennial Census taken from 1779 to 1863).
• Records of vital events, both as far as their dates of initiation as well as accessibility, are a function of state law in America … so there are frustratingly 50 different answers to this question! In addition, state laws change with some frequency—and not always toward the side of increased accessibility to records!—so this is a “moving target.” The FamilySearch Wiki, recommended by Myers, has an article “United States Vital Records” that is a good central source.

Weissleder had more questions to be answered … but we’ll save that for the next “Roots & Branches” column.