Ancestry.de has continued to post the various censuses for Mecklenburg Schwerin. So far, they have digitized and indexed censuses for this area that cover the following years:
Mecklenburg Schwerin Volkszählungen 1819
Mecklenburg Schwerin Volkszählungen 1867
There are a number of pretty good websites for English-speaking folks to find news directly from Germany. Following are a few I recommend:
Expatica.com - This website has information for expatriates and folks like us from a number of countries, including Germany. This link is to the German Home Page.
DW-World.de - Deutsche Welle - This website is “your link to Germany,” and includes news, as well as other items about German life.
Spiegel.de - Spiegal Online International - This is the English language website edition of the popular German magazine.
German Language News and Newspapers - At the MIT website.
The BBC Television program, “Who Do You Think You Are?” has taken Britain by storm. In fact, the opening broadcast of the fourth season garnered a whopping 30% British viewing audience in the 9 to 10 pm time slot.
Genealogy Television hasn’t caught on yet in America, but it’s being tried in Germany. The ZDF network has begun a series called “Auf der Spur meiner Ahnen.” That roughly translates to “On the Trace of My Ancestors.” Several episodes have run. One tracing German actor, Walter Sittler’s family; another episode featured actress Mariele Millowitsch. Both of these celebrities had to deal with the Nazi issue. The Sittler program garnered viewership of 1.26 million people or 8 per cent of the viewers.
Read an interesting article about the German genealogy TV program in the July 30, 2007 edition of Expatica.com.
While at the FGS conference in Fort Wayne, I got into a discussion about my Meitzler family in Germany with my friend, Ernest Thode; commenting that I had heard from a possible cousin living there a few days prior.
Ernie turned to his computer and quickly brought up the Geogen website, typed the name Meitzler into the search engine and came up with an onscreen map showing distribution of Meitzlers in Germany today. He confirmed my belief that most Meitzlers would be found in Landkreis Alzey-Worms, in the Pfalz, right where my Great-grandfather came from in 1848.
The database, operated by Christoph Stoepel, is based upon current telephone directory listings for Germany and Austria. It is available in an English and a German language version. It uses a color-coding of the Germanic districts to indicate how many phone listings were found for that area. It is not precise, but definately close enough to give the user a pretty good idea where cousins by a specific surname might be located today. The distribution can be mapped in two ways, Relative (how many folks per million population), and Absolute. This is the map I find most useful. For surnames with relatively small numbers, the Absolute distribution may be colorcoded as follows:
Absolute Distribution
If there are larger numbers of folks, then the Absolute Distribution is in larger numbers on the map. The final entry might be “more than 100 entries,” or, “more than 140 entries,” and so forth.
Following is a screen-print of the Absolute distribution of Meitzlers in Germany today. Note that in the Alzey-Worms Landkreis there are between 30 and 40 phone directory listings for Meitzlers. My family came from Kreigsfeld, which is right there.
Note that the new Ancestry.de website also has a similar distribution map, in German, of course.
The following excerpt is from an extensive article by Judy McGovern in the September 2 edition of the Ann Arbor News. This caught my eye not only because it deals with Germanic immigration to America, but because my own great grandparents were early Washtenaw County, Michigan settlers. My excerpt really doesn’t do the article justice, so I recommend you read the full thing at the Ann Arbor News site.
At first blush, the thing that seems remarkable about Friedrich Schmid is that the German minister walked from Ann Arbor to Detroit almost monthly for years. (Eventually, someone gave him a horse.)
But as you talk with folks who’ve compiled the history, you discover that what’s truly extraordinary is to what extent that one 19th century pastor shaped early Washtenaw County.
“He influenced a lot of people,” says genealogist Terry Stollsteimer, who’s tracked most families of German ancestry who settled in Washtenaw County before 1890.
Scores and scores of those families came here at the behest of the circuit-riding Lutheran, Stollsteimer says. Generations later, many of those family names persist.
The dozens of congregations Schmid formed in Southeast Michigan are central to his legacy. That spiritual legacy is being celebrated next week, the 200th anniversary of his birth.
Yet his role in fashioning the makeup of the county merits attention, too.
“Historians are very interested in him,” says the Rev. Charles R. Schulz, pastor of Freedom Township’s St. Thomas Evangelical Lutheran Church, who’s organized the Sept. 9 anniversary observance. “Schmid was a magnet.”
Schmid was born in 1807 in Walddorf, in the northern part of the Black Forest. He was sent to Michigan as a missionary in 1833 - just 10 years after the first recorded European settlement in the county, nine years after Elisha W. Rumsey and John Allen built the Allen cabin in Ann Arbor.
He sailed from France and after nine weeks reached Detroit, via the Erie Canal.
At least one account holds that Schmid had been sent to Christianize Native Americans but turned his attention to German settlers when he saw that they had no church and found their conduct wanting. Others report that he had been sent at the request of an Ann Arbor settler named Jonathan Mann. Schmid did, indeed, marry Mann’s daughter Sophia about a year after his arrival.
….
“There’s no question in my mind,” says Stollsteimer. “Before 1833, there were very few families from that northern Black Forest area in Washtenaw County.”
After 1833, there came a deluge of names like: Braun, Bross, Dieterle, Eberle, Ehnis, Hartmann, Helber, Herter, Huber, Kappler, Katz, Kempf, Lang, Lutz, Mast, Rauschenberger, Reichert, Rentschler, Schairer, Schumacher, Seeger, Seitz, Seyfried, Steeb, Stein, Stoll, Waidelich, Wiedmayer and Wurster.
“Most of these families were very much influenced by Schmid after he came in 1833,” says Stollsteimer, an Ann Arbor native who now makes his home in Shelby Township. “Most of them came between 1842 and 1880.”
Read the full article in the Sept. 2, 2007 edition of the Ann Arbor News. You will find it on three pages.
Patty pointed out an item she found on the American Historical Association blog to me a bit ago. It is from back in March, but still timely. Following is an excerpt:
The Bavarian State Library, or Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, one of Europe’s most important and most visited research libraries, has joined Google’s ongoing efforts to digitize public domain books and make them fully available on Google Book Search.
Read the full blog in the March 27, 2007 blog written by David Darlington.
Volumes 14 and 15 of the Map Guide to German Parish Registers series covering Bavaria Unterfranken (Volume 14) and Oberfranken (Volume 15) are now available in both soft and hard cover. All orders can be shipped within 24 hours for either book.
One thing that should be mentioned about Bavarian research is that there is very little in the way of Family History Library microfilm of the parish registers themselves. The Map Guide books thus become even more valuable in that the user can narrow down what Bavarian churches they need to write to. So don’t expect to see a lot of Family History Library film numbers in the Bavarian volumes. However, you will find the information needed to find the church your ancestor attended as well as churches immediately surrounding it.
These volumes (14 and 15) are not posted this website yet, in that Joe is making changes to the site prior to posting of these last two books. However, they are still available at Family Roots Publishing Company, PO Box 830, Bountiful, Utah 84011.
Mail order costs are $34.95 each for the soft cover books, and $65.00 each for hard cover. Add $4.90 p&h for the first volume in a shipment, with $2 for each thereafter.
My Meitzler family emigrated from Germany in 1849. Contact was kept with family in Germany until my great-grandmother’s death in April of 1918. After that, contact was lost. I’ve considered attempting to contact family in Germany, but haven’t made any moves that direction until yesterday - when I got a message from an Elmar Meitzler, who lives near where my family lived in the mid-19th century. According to my father, some of the family fought on the German side of WWI. That’s all he knew.
One of the sites that has been useful in my search for German soldiers in the National German Military Grave Registration Service database that contains the names of more than two million war dead or missing German soldiers from WWI & WWII.
I searched the site and located five Meitzlers who died or came up missing in WWI and WWII.
The site is all in German - naturally. Just fill in the blanks to do a search.
The following information may help in filling in the forms.
Nachname means “surname” in English. You’ve got to put something in this field.
Vorname means “first name” in English. Leave blank if you wish all of a particular surname.
You may fill in a date of birth (Geburtsdatum) or death (Todes). Leave blank if you know nothing.
Click on “Suche beginnen” lower down on the page to start a search. You will then be prompted to register your name & address to continue the search.
The registration form requires the following information:
Vorname (first name)
Nachname (last name)
Strasse Nr. (street and number)
Land/Plz/Ort (country/postal or ZIP code/city)
Note that I scrambled this all up very badly the first time I did a search, and the website still accepted my address. It just requires all the blanks have something in them.
Click on “Zur Ergebniseite” to continue.
On the next screen, click “Suchanfrage ausfuhren” (implement query retrieval).
You should then get the results of your search. Be sure and click on the names for more detailed information.
If you can’t read German, use Babel Fish Translations at Alta Vista.
This post was made originally at the www.genealogyblog.com website, and is posted here with modifications.
If you’re doing research in Germanic parish registers, you’ll find that you will run across Latin terminology on a regular basis. A good resource for wading your way through unfamiliar Latin words can be found in “Research Guidance” at FamilySearch.org. See the Latin Genealogical Word List.
While searching on Ancestry.de this morning, I happened to run across a link to a new German genealogy-related blog called Abenteuer Ahnenforschung written by Andrea Bentschneider. Andrea was born in 1968 in Hamburg and grew up there. After spending 10 years in New York she returned to Hamburg in 2001.
Andrea’s blog is written in the German language for the German audience, and is sponsored by Ancestry.de. However, it’s of interest to American genealogists doing Germanic research. If you’re having trouble reading German, run the site pages through iGoogle, and read it in English. Of course, the translation leaves a lot to be desired, but you’ll be able to get the gist of most items.