ROOTS & BRANCHES

Last week’s “Roots & Branches” column explored the answers to an inquiry made by Dirk Weissleder, my friend and fellow International German Genealogy Partnership board member, who was seeking systematic listings of some major U.S. record groups.

Weissleder is engaged in trying to research some 40 families with his surname who came to American between 1837 and 1951, so he’s primarily looking for documents that help track immigrant families.

His inquiry aligns with one of my “genealogy philosophy” questions about Internet research—how can you be sure you’ve looked at all potential items from a record group?

Originals can be left unfilmed when a microfilm is created (and in most cases digitized offerings are the result of microfilm-to-digital transfer). A database with an all-inclusive title often turns out to be significantly “less inclusive.”

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.

Last week’s column covered the “low-hanging fruit,” so to say. These are the port entry records and censuses, both of which are fairly easy to find listings for. Both groups have been pretty thoroughly digitized, too, and this is mostly the case with civil vital records, with the caveat that different state laws create vast differences in accessibility.

Just as in Germany,  for the years before vital records, church records often fill the void but here the multitude of American church denominations—historically in the German states where were really only two of consequence, the Lutheran and Reformed, and they were joined as a generic Protestant church called Evangelisch in most areas—makes it difficult to “cover all the bases.”

FamilySearch Wiki articles on American counties probably are the best in-one-place guides but they are dependent somewhat on what’s in the Family History Library. In addition to congregational records of baptisms, marriages and burials, there are many private pastoral registers with these same vital records substitutes … many of which were not also copied into congregational books.

For the American Midwest, the best resource is the series by Roger P. Minert’s team titled German Immigrants in American Church Records, which contain abstracts of church records mentioning immigrant origins.

Finally, Weissleder had asked about other record sets mentioning immigrant origins. There are two, neither of which is easily “checklisted,” but important nonetheless:

• Naturalizations of immigrants, when these people took steps to become citizens, are often helpful documents. Before the early 1900s, though, naturalizations often took place in a multitude of courts and since it was customarily a two-step process, documents can end up in multiple places, which complicates the search.
• German-language newspapers are an underutilized source. “Roots & Branches,” of course, has written of them recently and we won’t repeat everything on that here. Using Chronicling America’s “US Newspaper Directory, 1690-Present” is often your first stop to inventory such papers.

There are many great American resources for German immigrants; but there are many places to look, too.