ROOTS & BRANCHES

In the most orderly of genealogy worlds, a scan of every single record would be available on the Internet and searchable by name from a database attached to the scans.

We could well get to that orderly genealogy world someday—after FamilySearch pulled off the feat of digitizing all its microfilms in a decade when it was originally forecast to take up to a century, I’m not about to say that anything is impossible!—but for now, genealogists have to be resourceful to find things that are not so orderly.

A case in point is the registers of Trinity Lutheran Church in Cleveland, Ohio.

Scans of the registers from when the congregation was created in 1853 as a “daughter” church of Zion Lutheran Church, Cleveland, can be found on FamilySearch.org.

But this is a “browsable” collection that isn’t searchable.

Well, at least it’s not searchable on the FamilySearch website.

But, thanks to Bob Greiner of the Mid-Atlantic Germanic Society, the first register of Trinity’s baptisms, confirmations, marriages, and burials is a member-searchable database on the society website.

In the course of putting together his database, Greiner found a number of interesting demographics about the members of the Trinity congregation.

Foremost was that the first two pastors included the German village origins (as well as birth dates in Germany) for many of the people mentioned. Greiner suspects that many of the immigrants left after the Revolutions of 1848 rolled through Europe.

Greiner also found a larger cluster in the congregation of families from the region of Osnabrück in the north German state of Hannover.

All told, Greiner’s database contains information on more than 5,000 events mentioning more than 7,000 unique people. As an indication of the size of the Osnabrück cluster, he identified more than 200 married couples with roots there.

Information about joining the society to access the database is found at the URL, https://www.magsgen.com/

There are a few lessons here:

• Don’t discount records that are merely browsable since they might hold the key to identifying immigrant ancestry.
• Understand that searchable databases may show up in counterintuitive places. Ohio’s not in the mid-Atlantic but yet the MAGS website is where the searchable database for the Trinity records resides.
• Also recall that earlier records about the members of Trinity may be found at Zion’s and that these records are not online … the congregation or a denominational archive will likely need to be contacted to see what records exist and how they can be accessed.
• Likewise, later records of these families might be found in several churches created as “daughters” in turn.

The moral to the story: Never give up!