ROOTS & BRANCHES

I’ve written previously in “Roots & Branches” about how much I love maps and that this passion has culminated in my latest book.

Well, that book is The Family Tree Historical Atlas of Germany and it is available for pre-ordering, with an expected shipping date in the second half of May (People who are attuned to news in the genealogy world may know that the parent of the book’s publisher recently has entered into Chapter 11 protection—but this will have no impact on the publication or distribution of the book … it’s being printed even as this is written).

The atlas revolves around helping people with German-speaking ancestry to making the connections between their immigrant forbears’ places of origin and the larger jurisdictions – political and religious – to which those places belonged to historically as well as belong to today.

This is important because the knowledge of the larger jurisdictions helps determine where records relating to these ancestors are archived.

This can be somewhat challenging because Germany has what I call a “non-linear” political history. In the United States, new municipalities and counties are generally created from existing entities – a “linear” political history. Germany, on the other hand, was a collection of small, independent states that were constantly being sliced, diced and otherwise disconnected as noble dynasties went extinct, lost wars or were divided amongst sons.

For each area of Germany, there is also at least one detail map for the pre-Napoleonic era to show the smaller states; other chapters include modern-day German state maps, as well as some showing demographics such as religion and dialects and also a few maps showing German-speaking Austria and Switzerland.

Whether it’s the movements of the Germanic tribes who first pressed against the Roman Empire as barbarians (and then later supplanted it) or the jurisdictions during the millennium of the Holy Roman Empire’s existence, the mapping of these areas has been a continual exercise in fluidity.

For the casual genealogist, there may be an inclination to say “so what?”—but this impulse may deny the researcher the opportunity to do a deep archival dive into more records and documents created about their ancestors.

The upshot is that records may exist in archives that appear to have no current political relationships with the villages in question.

In addition to the partial index of cities and immigrant hotspots included in the print-version of the atlas, there will be an every-place index available online.

The Family Tree Historical Atlas of Germany is available from Family Tree Books at the URL, https://www.familytreemagazine.com/store/historical-atlas-of-germany