Our colleague Heike Leiacker is our specialist for probate research. But she also enjoys the exciting research she does for various private clients – and their delight at the information she finds!
"When you drive into the office in the morning with a grin on your face, you know you have chosen the right job." (Quote from Ralf Stullich)
According to him, he has achieved this with his work for us.
He is your first point of contact with us when it comes to whether and how we can help you. In most cases, you will receive a written offer from him after a brief review of the information you have provided. If there are any uncertainties or questions, he will often pick up the phone and discuss them with you personally.
Andrea Bentschneider at the grave of her great-great-great-great-grandfather in the USA
She hardly needs an introduction: the founder of Beyond History, Andrea Bentschneider. Well known from television and various newspaper articles, she is not only the heart of the company, but also its face.
The Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e.V. (German War Graves Commission) is probably known to most German genealogists - or it should be. Mainly, because information on fallen or missing persons from the First and Second World Wars can be found via an online searchable database or a search request.
But the War Graves Commission also looks after German war grave sites abroad, supports the institutions looking after the ones in Germany, is involved in the culture of remembrance and offers educational programs for young people.
The regional association in Saxony is currently pursuing a very special project. And perhaps you can help with it!
Did your ancestors (or their family members) emigrate? If they did, you are probably interested in learning more about their journey and the conditions the might have had to endure.
Hopefully, our blog series on emigration from Germany can give you some interesting insight. If you would like to get a more direct feeling, emigration and immigration museums can be a great way to walk in your ancestors footsteps. We can highly recommend the following ones.
Many of them will also give you the opportunity to access documents and information that could help with your genealogical research.
Are you looking for traces of your emigrated German ancestors in their destination country? Then you are exactly right here, because after we have already presented a number of sources and contact points in Germany recently, today will write about sources for research in the respective immigration countries (destination countries).
Of course, these differ greatly according to the respective country of arrival/immigration so that we can only give an overview for some countries here.
Some of the sources are also available online through a wide variety of platforms (including paid ones). As always in genealogy, you should keep an eye on the seriousness and reliability of the source before adopting the information.
North America
Arrival passenger lists
In some countries, for example in the USA, all arriving passengers of emigrant ships were registered. Due to the variations from nation to nation, we cannot give an exact list here. However, the lists of passengers arriving in the US on ships from all over the world are collected in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. The original lists were destroyed after being backed up on microfilm. Various databases record arriving passengers by port of arrival or nationality. The collection "Germans to America" should be mentioned here, one of the various efforts to at least partially reconstruct the Bremen passenger lists in particular on the basis of the arrival lists in the USA.
For the Port of New York, there is also a separate database for arrivals at the immigration center at Castle Garden on the southern tip of Manhattan from 1820 until the official founding of Ellis Island in 1892.
Census records
Censuses have been taken in the United States every ten years since 1790. Lists of these censuses are also preserved at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Other regional census lists may also be of interest for your genealogical research if, for example, they document stops of your ancestors along the way to the US. Changes of residence in the destination country and family members, occupations, etc. can also be traced through census lists if you are lucky.
Obituaries
In the USA, it is customary at the time of a person's death to list in an obituary his or her life story with the various stages, occupations, places of residence, spouses, children, and grandchildren. These were published in local newspapers and some are searchable online.
Immigration museums
The best-known example here is the Immigration Museum in New York Harbor on Ellis Island. Its Immigration Center was established in 1892. There, much can be learned about the stages of emigration, arrival in the US, and the quarantine period on the island. A database is also available at the in-house research center.
South America
Immigration organizations and societies for the study of immigrants
The Martius-Staden Institute in Sao Paulo for the cultivation of German culture in Brazil and Latin America provides a fine example.
Australia
Newspaper articles about arriving ships
Especially in Australia, it was often common to publish the arrival of ships, sometimes even listing the arriving passengers.
If you have found among your ancestors some who dared to emigrate despite all the risks of the journey and adversities of arrival, you may want to shed more light on their path. But how do you go about it? Here, as in other genealogical researches, there are always various possibilities, depending, among other things, on the circumstances in the various states and countries.
Today we would like to address a frequently asked question from our foreign clients, the answer to which always causes astonishment.
In the USA and also in other countries, graves are usually laid out for eternity. In Islam or Judaism, too, eternal rest for the deceased is supposed to be guaranteed. Accordingly, we often receive inquiries about the resting places of ancestors to be visited during a trip, or requests for photos of the gravesites. Unfortunately, this is often not possible in Germany.
Of course we can try to find out where an ancestor was buried, but whether the grave still exists is a completely different question.
On 01 July 2004 I started my own business with my hobby, genealogy, and founded Beyond History. Looking back, this was one of the best decisions I ever made - even though it was not always sunshine and roses. I always like to remember the beginnings and would like to take you with me today on a short journey through the history of our company.
Finally being an adult and thus beeing self-determined! The age of majority is often longed for. In Germany, for example, you have then full legal capacity to conclude contracts of all kinds, the ability to legally buy alcohol and tobacco products, to go to nightclubs, to vote, to freely determine your place of residence, and to marry without the permission of your legal guardians or a family court. However, you also have to live with the consequences of your own actions.
To be considered legally as an adult has therefore advantages and disadvantages (even if there are still transition periods e.g. in the criminal law). In the last 150 years or so, the legal age of majority in Germany has been lowered several times. Today it is 18 years.
For genealogy the age of a person and especially the age of majority play a not unimportant role, too. Depending on the age of a person, other sources may become relevant for the research. Also additions like "volljährig" (of full age), “grossjährig” (of “great” age), "majorenn" (from Latin majorennis which comes from maior annis, meaning greater in years), "major" or, in contrast, such as “minderjährig” (minor), “halbwüchsig” (half-grown), "minorenn" or "minor" can also help to determine the approximate age of a person and thus, for example, to find out (or at least to find a hint) which of potentially several persons with the same names a particular one might be.
On 30 November 1676, the General-Feuer-Cassa - the world's first insurance company still in existence today - was founded in Hamburg. The city's pre-existing fire contracts were combined and a public insurance company was created, which still exists today under the name Hamburger Feuerkasse, albeit now as part of a large insurance group. The historical holdings stored in the State Archive Hamburg are also relevant for genealogical research.
Florian Heyden: "Walter Ulbricht. Mein Urgrossvater" (Walter Ulbricht. My great-grandfather) published on 09 September 2021 as a revised and expanded new edition.
On 29 September 2021, the revised and expanded new edition of the book by our client Florian Heyden is published in German: “Walter Ulbricht. Mein Urgrossvater” (Walter Ulbricht. My great-grandfather). It was an honor to be part of the research for this book.
German church books, Source and copy right: Archion.de (https://www.archion.de/en/). We would like to thank them for the permission to use the picture.
We did not forget our top 10 sources for genealogy. How could we? After all, we are working with them on a daily basis. Today we would like to share some information on church books in Germany.
What a great story! In our line of work, interesting first names are not uncommon - we often ask ourselves what parents might have thought when naming a child. In this case we know it exactly and it is a very nice appreciation of the family’s German ancestors and of the birth date of the child.
Advertisement for the emigration to America, source: United States Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division in Washington, D.C., LC-DIG-pga-13282, Auswanderung nach Amerika. Amerika und seine Freuden. Public domain, via Library of Congress (https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2003691148/).
Those who engage in genealogical research will probably sooner or later discover that family members packed up and emigrated. Emigrants left Germany for overseas mostly from the cities Hamburg or Bremen. North and South America and Australia were common destinations. However, it was not unusual either to travel eastwards, all across the continent to reach Bessarabia (Southern Russia) for example.
