Praise for German Parish Records
“The historic boundries of the old German parishes have not been defined except in very general terms, particularly for the mid-to-late-1800s. This book remedies that problem and serves as to road map to these records — saving hours of effort. Wow!” — Bill Dollarhide, genealogical writer, popular speaker and author of numerous book, including the best-selling Map Guide to the U.S. Federal Censuses 1790 - 1920.
“Unlike ordinary German gazetteers and histories, this meticulously organized reference book provides invaluable assistance in homing in on the specific parish needed to help locate your family’s ecclesiastical records. The book is easy to use and makes locating towns referenced in genealogical documents and historical references a snap. Kevan M. Hansen’s work is sure to become a definitive reference work for German genealogists everywhere. Brilliant!” — George Morgan, author of How to Do Everything with Your Genealogy, popular podcaster with The Genealogy Guys, and genealogical speaker.
“Not only can you instantly locate where your ancestor most likely went to church, but these clear, easy to read maps show the surrounding parishes-complete with the Family History Library microfilm numbers for each.” — Thomas Jay Kemp, M.L.S., of Genealogybank.com, author of the International Vital Records Handbook, and Chair of the ALA Genealogy & Local History Discussion Group.
Map Guide to German Parish Registers
The Best Finding Aid for German Parish Research Ever!
European genealogical research is usually related to the ecclesiastic jurisdiction where the births, christenings, marriages, deaths, and burials are located today. In the 19th century German areas, that means searching the Parish Registers for Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, or other churches. Until now this has been a long and difficult task.
The elements of all of the old German parishes are known, but defined only by what towns were assigned to each parish. For this new series of maps, and by working with digitized underlying maps of Germany, the old boundaries were drawn to encompass those towns included in each individual parish. This provides a view of how the various parishes fit together and defines the boundaries of each district, adjoining towns, and surrounding parishes. These are the only maps you will find that show the boundaries for the 19th century German parishes. (Click on image to see larger version.)
Each book is divided into five sections:
- Province/Duchy resources
- Maps of parish boundaries for the main Lutheran churches
- Maps of parish boundaries for the Catholic churches
- Records availability for minority religions
- A complete index to all of the towns shown on the individual maps.
Once a particular parish has been selected as the possible place, a link to the actual film number in the Family History Library’s huge collection is provided. Use the Map Guide to find the name of the parish, then use the book’s “Parish Key” to find the film number. (Click on image to see larger version.)
The Map Guide makes your research easy. Included in each volume is:
- A master index to the parishes themselves
- The family history library microfilm numbers
- A listing of towns in that district.
For example, the Lutheran map for the Kreis (district) of Budingen on page 32 shows that the town of Calbach belonged to parish #42 which the parish key identifies as Budingen itself. The parish key also shows that the microfilmed records for the parish of Budingen can be found on FHL film #1197019. By entering this number in the Microfilm Number Search in the Family History Library Catalog at Family Search website, you can obtain a printout of all films for a given parish and years included on each one. The process has been reduced to a few minutes - not hours and hours of frustrating searches of place name books and gazetteers.
Each volume in this series is available individually.