A: Archion
Archion.de is a subscription-based site, but worth the money! This Protestant church book portal has been an amazing resource for my clients. There are currently 140,000 digitized church books online and they are working on uploading more each and every day.
B: Bremen Emigration and Immigration
Millions of emigrants left Germany, Austria, Hungary, and other European countries from the port of Bremen. In this FamilySearch article, learn about the history of the port, the destruction of almost all passenger records from there, and links to helpful resources related to passenger lists.
C: CompGen
CompGen gives you access to over 50 million personal data records from family history books, municipal, address books, family announcements, gazetteers, lists of casualties, and more. A great resource for German genealogists!
D: DeepL
This machine translation tool at deepl.com can be a bit more accurate than Google Translate – just be sure to use it for short words and phrases and not entire documents, as that can go quite wrong in genealogy. See Six Reasons Why a Human is Better than Google Translate for Genealogy Documents.
E: Europe in the XIX. Century
This fun and interactive map tool shows you what Europe looked like in the 19th century. Zoom in, zoom out, and see the borders of what Europe was like when your ancestors lived there. Want more? This site has city maps, country maps, cadastral maps, and more. So fun!
F: FamilySearch German Genealogy Page
Just getting started in German genealogy? Or need more tips for your research? FamilySearch’s German Genealogy Page is the place to start, with research tools, information and links relating to German states, duchies, etc., maps, German genealogy vocabulary, and more.
G: Genteam.at
This Austrian-based website hosts a collection of genealogical databases, especially useful for those searching in Austria and the Czech Republic. It also features a very helpful gazetteer for your research!
H: Hamburg Passenger Lists
Unlike the Bremen passenger lists, the Hamburg passenger lists still exist – and are great resources! This FamilySearch article on the topic contains links to these lists as well as some very helpful information about how to use them.
I: International German Genealogy Partnership
J: JewishGen
Have Jewish ancestors? JewishGen is the site to use, with millions of records from around the world, gazetteers, and more.
K: Kirchenkalender
Have you worked with a church record and seen a church holiday, a special Sunday, or a feast day listed as your ancestor’s date of birth/marriage/death? This church calendar converter converts those feast days to actual dates for you when you type in the year of your record!
L: Leo
Need a good German to English online dictionary? Leo is one of my favorites!
M: MeyersGaz
Meyers Gazetteer is one of the most important sites for German genealogy. This collection of pre-WWI German towns offers a searchable database with a wildcard feature – so if you can only read some of the letters in your town name, type it in to MeyersGaz and see what comes up!
Ready for resources N to Z? Stay tuned! Make sure you are subscribed to the newsletter to get first access when it goes live!
5 Responses
Should be very useful.
Thank you very much for this info! I appreciate the time it took to put it all together!
So glad you like it – thank you for the nice comment!
Z: https://zeitpunkt.nrw
Zeitungsportal NRW
“The project, funded by the state of NRW, digitizes local newspapers from NRW in the period from 1801-1945 and presents them to the general public in this newspaper portal, which is constantly being expanded.”
The portal provides not only scans of newspaper pages, but can be searched because they ran OCR on the pages. This is very helpful for further research and the newspapers provide an understanding of the current situation at earlier points in time.
I found an ad for my grandfather who was looking for his lost wallet in 1929.
Thank you so much. Fascinating.