ROOTS & BRANCHES

It’s sometimes the case that genealogists get a little single minded.

(Beat)

OK, now that those of you who are single-minded genealogists (or know one) have gotten the laughs out of your system – what genealogist, uh, isn’t single minded? – we can proceed with our regularly scheduled column.

Because what I’m going to opine upon is trying not to be so single minded in the pursuit of ancestors that you miss the historical context of those ancestors … and therefore some good information and records about them!

To give a couple of many examples that I could, let’s talk about a couple record sets that are often written about: German church records and civil registers.

You’ll hear that German church records are one of the best sources for tracing the ancestry of German-speaking people and that’s absolutely true. You’ll also hear – and I’ve one of many people who’ve said it – that many church records were destroyed in the Thirty Years War, which ended in 1648, and that few such registers predate that era.

Unfortunately, when I’ve said that, I think people often hear simply “no church records before 1648.”

This leads to a couple of misconceptions.

First, that it’s useless to try and look for church records before that date. But that’s not true, either, since there were many villages in Germany that were not touched by the Thirty Years War. Also, in some cases where church records are not extant, that there are tax assessment lists or guild registers that might fill in for the lack of earlier records.

Second, some people assume the opposite: That if the registers don’t start right in 1648, that someone must be hiding something. Well, unfortunately, there were some later wars that were tremendously destructive and have resulted in registers that only start in the 18^th century.

As far as civil registers, the date a lot of people fixate on in 1876, the year in which universal civil registration of births, marriages and deaths was decreed throughout the Second German Empire.

That’s accurate, but it doesn’t take into account that many areas of Germany began registration earlier that that – in some cases, generations earlier.

The German mega-state of Prussia, for example, had required registration within its borders since 1874, but many of the western areas of Germany that were conquered during the French revolutionary period or by French Emperor Napoleon I soon afterwards had started civil registers in the 1790s or early 1800s.

In addition, the governments of many of the German states started requiring “church book duplicates” in the early 1800s that give researchers an extra shot at finding records, since in most cases either the original church books or the duplicates have survived.