The wonder of German genealogy expert Ernest Thode’s Genealogy at a Glance: German Genealogy Research—one of our most popular At a Glance guides—is that it manages to provide all the information you’ll ever need on how to get started and proceed with your genealogy research in just four pages. Thode’s guide, originally published in 2011, has now been updated to contain the most current URLs for online genealogy sites, as well as some additional tips and suggested resources for German genealogy researchers.

It is said that more Americans are of German origin than any other nationality, yet Germany wasn’t created as a sovereign state until 1871. Germanic origins are therefore quite diffuse, covering most of the German-speaking regions of central Europe, including Austria, Switzerland, portions of Belgium, Denmark, Poland, and parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Genealogical research into German origins is thus understandably complex, but Genealogy at a Glance: German Genealogy Research. Updated Edition can help set you on the right path. With information on German emigration to America, surnames and given names, places of origin, church records, civil registration, and censuses, as well as citations to the best books and online sources, you’ll have all the key elements of a research strategy right at your fingertips.

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When the first edition of this book was published in 1987, searching for German ancestors was a more cumbersome and likely more expensive proposition. A lot of legwork was required in order to pinpoint what records were available in Germany and where they were housed, letters had to be written and fees paid, followed up by weeks of waiting for responses. Today, all of the major archives and many of the smaller ones, as well as church parishes, have websites containing contact information and information on their holdings; many have put digitized images of their records online. Correspondence can usually now be handled more quickly and less expensively via e-mail. An ever increasing number of searchable databases with information relevant to German ancestor-hunters—passenger lists, vital records, censuses, cemetery records, surname directories, etc.—has greatly improved opportunities for research.

The fifth edition of the book highlights all of the recent developments–new facilities, new websites, newly available records–that have made German family history research immeasurably easier. Completely revised and updated, this edition of In Search of Your German Roots is now the most current and comprehensive guide to German roots available.

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Edward J. Lowell’s The Hessians and the Other German Auxiliaries of Great Britain in the Revolutionary War, one of the earliest histories of the German auxiliary troops, is a landmark work that presents a comprehensive record of the German role in the American Revolution from the German perspective. After describing the political situation in Hesse and the treaties that induced the German soldiers to fight for the British, Lowell uses original German accounts of almost every battle from 1776 to the end of the war to create a picture of what sort of people the auxiliaries were, and what impression America and the Americans made on them. This book will be of great interest to the many researchers in the United States and Canada whose ancestors were German auxiliary soldiers from the Revolutionary era.

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One such unit of German soldiers was the Royal German Regiment Zweibrucken, or Deux-Ponts, led by Prince Christian von Zweibrucken. The Royal German Regiment Zweibrucken is the focal point of this publication, which is based upon a heretofore unpublished manuscript by H.A. Rattermann found among the papers in the Rattermann Collection at the University of Illinois-Urbana by the noted German-American authority, Don Heinrich Tolzmann, who also edited the manuscript for publication.

Rattermann’s account follows Prince Zweibrucken and his charges from April 15, 1780, when they sailed for America. After landing in Newport, Rhode Island on July 11, Zweibrucken’s unit encamped at various places in New England. During the spring and summer of the following year, Deux-Ponts was instrumental in launching feint attacks against British General Henry Clinton’s forces in New York, while a large American army was beginning to amass against Cornwallis in Virginia. The German unit eventually arrived in Williamsburg on September 26, 1781, and from October 14-17, contributed to the U.S. victory at Yorktown–ironically by fighting directly opposite Hessian forces.

Augmenting the account of Prince Zweibrucken’s auxiliary forces are an extensive bibliography devoted to the German role in the Revolution, an itemization of a handful of other German allied units, and a clarifying Introduction and Conclusion on the German and German-American presence in this great conflict. Dr. Tolzmann has made a valuable contribution to the literature of the American War for Independence by bringing this manuscript to the light of day.

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According to the authors, “the primary purpose of the Encyclopedia of German-American Genealogical Research is to survey the material available to the genealogist seeking to link American lineages with their origins in German-speaking Europe,” and since German-American genealogical research had not been surveyed before, this “Encyclopedia will serve as an inventory of both known and unknown” source materials. As an example, they provide a comprehensive list of muster rolls of German mercenaries in the American Revolution located in American archives. A further purpose of the Encyclopedia is to provide American researchers with background material on German customs, sociological stratification, governmental organization, and ethnographic considerations having a bearing on immigrant ancestors.

To heighten the appeal of the book, the authors offer a special section on genealogy in Germany, with emphasis on land records, state vital records, court records, census records, municipal records, and church records. In addition, they provide a detailed breakdown of the sovereign territories of Germany and a history of the organization of the Holy Roman Empire. Moreover, there is a section on language and names and one on heraldry, with a final section on German published sources. Where possible, findings published in obscure German publications have been included in the conviction that unless special effort is made to bring these findings to the attention of American researchers, they are unlikely ever to receive the attention they deserve.

Since there are more Americans of German descent than any other nationality, the long-awaited reprint of this 1976 publication should be warmly welcomed.

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Quite apart from the invaluable rosters and service records, the book explores the history of the various units, their organization, personnel, and campaigns. Inevitably, the bulk of the work focuses on the Pennsylvania-Germans in the Continental Army, the Pennsylvania Line, the German Regiment, and the Flying Camp, though there is considerable data on the Pennsylvania-Germans in Maryland and Virginia regiments. Of almost equal importance are the chapters on the Emergency Men, patriots and non-combatants, each with biographical sketches of eminent men.

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Divided into subject categories, the bibliography contains citations to all published writings dealing with the Germans in colonial North America (chiefly Pennsylvania), whether in the form of general histories, magazine articles, newspapers, pamphlets, mug-books, church records, town, county, and state histories, or printed genealogies, and it attempts to give as complete an account of the printed source material as possible. It is in effect the starting point in Pennsylvania-German research because it acquaints the researcher with everything that had been published up through the cut-off year of 1933.

Altogether the bibliography contains citations to about 8,000 items which range across subjects as diverse as immigration and architecture. The bulk of the citations, however, are to books and articles dealing with such subjects as emigration from the Palatinate, the German settlements in Pennsylvania and other colonies, immigration and migration, church history, local history, biography, and genealogy, this last group alone encompassing citations to no fewer than 1,700 family histories. An excellent place to begin research!

Used wisely, this book will eliminate the need to ransack whole libraries in search of answers.

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The records of actual marriages, which form the basis of the work, generally give the names of the bride and groom, the date of marriage, names of parents, place of residence, and sometimes place of origin, date of birth, and previous marital status; while records of marriage deriving from baptismal entries, burial records, etc., variously give names of parents (usually the maiden name of the mother), names of grandparents and sponsors, place and date of birth and/or baptism, names of children, and date of death. Many of the records transcribed here are capsule pedigrees, some identifying three or more generations in a direct line of descent. There is, besides, an abundance of out-of-the-way and unexpected information. Considered as a whole, Pennsylvania German Marriages must rank as one of the premier sources in all of Pennsylvania-German genealogy.

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To overcome this challenge, a Brigham Young University project was launched in 1996 to identify the records of German emigrants by cataloguing the relevant record holdings in all the public and private archives in the Federal Republic of Germany. This book is the direct outgrowth of that ambitious project. Under the supervision of Professor Raymond Wright, approximately 2,000 national, state and local government archives, as well as private archives, were surveyed. Questionnaires were mailed to archivists asking them to identify their archives’ jurisdictions and to describe the records housed in their archives and the services provided by their staff. The returned questionnaires, supplemented by Internet searches, were used to create summaries of each archive’s jurisdictions, holdings, and services. The result of this massive survey, published here, is an exhaustive guide to family history sources in German archives at every level of jurisdiction, public and private. Anyone searching for data about people who lived in Germany in the past need only determine which archives today have jurisdiction over the records that were created by church or state institutions.

The questionnaire sent to German archivists asked specifically for information about each archive’s collections of vital records, religious records, military records, emigration records, passport records, censuses, and town and county records. Archivists were also asked to describe any published guides or inventories to their collections. Compiled in book form, the answers appear here in chapters dealing with the federal archives (Bundesarchive), religious archives, and the various archives in each of Germany’s sixteen states (Lander), including town (Kreisstadte), city (Stadtarchiv), and county archives (Kreis).

To facilitate the location of records in each archive or repository, the book is arranged in the following manner: Within each state chapter all entries are arranged in alphabetical order by the name of the city in which the archive is located. The first part of each chapter contains listings of state archives; next, all city and regional archives are listed. Church archives with jurisdictions within the state are in the third section, while the fourth section lists family archives. Last, all other archives in the state for which a questionnaire was returned, or a website found, are listed.

For each of the 2,000 archives, information is provided under the following headings:

• Name and Address of the Archive (including phone, fax, e-mail, and Internet)
• Jurisdiction of the Archive
• Organization of the Archive’s Records
• Published Guides or Descriptions of Collections
• Emigration Records
• Records of Churches or Religious Communities
• Civil Registration of Births, Marriages, and Deaths
• Civil Registration of Residents
• Records of Cities, Towns, and Districts
• Censuses
• Military Records
• Records from Former German Communities Now in Other Countries

Designed to answer the researcher’s most frequently asked questions regarding the type of records that exist and where such records can be found, this massive compilation holds the key to genealogical research in Germany. Comparisons abound, but Ancestors in German Archives closely resembles Ancestry’s Red Book in that it is an all-in-one directory to genealogical sources in all repositories in all places in one country. In this case, of course, it is a one-stop guide to genealogical sources in Germany, and it is clearly the most indispensable finding-aid ever published on the subject. Most importantly, it answers the fundamental questions about the very existence of genealogical records in Germany and paves the way for successful research.

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