I recently came across some family names that I was previously unaware of. Some family members had been separated, killed, or went missing during WW2. Are there good places to search for records, especially those from Germany, Ukraine and Russia? I'd be especially grateful for some sort of adoption records from Germany from the mid/late 1940's. Also wonderful would be birth/death records.
I can't speak to what websites are good for this. AFAIK most of the websites are scams, to Geonode's point.
One great source for genealogy however is the Church of the Latter Day Saints. They have well funded teams that research genealogy non stop. [1] I would just visit a local church and see if they can assist.
On the FamilySearch wiki linked to in the parent, there are also many country-specific guides that link to resources both inside and outside of FamilySearch. Those that may be of interest to you given the countries you mentioned:
Also see the main wiki page, which has a Locality finder and may have other links depending on how far back you want to go (e.g., German Empire): https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Main_Page
To anyone else (like me) wondering why the Mormons maintain a genealogy database:
> Mormons trace their family trees to find the names of ancestors who died without learning about the restored Mormon Gospel so that these relatives from past generations can be baptized by proxy in the temple. For Latter-day Saints, genealogy is a way to save more souls and strengthen the eternal family unit.
A little more detail: for Christians, baptism is considered to be a requirement to enter the kingdom of God (per John 3:5), but obviously most people throughout the history of the world never get that opportunity. This creates a problem because Christians also believe that God is a god of justice. Proxy baptisms resolve the issue by performing the ordinance for each individual who didn't receive it while alive, and then it's left to them to reject it or accept it.
Interestingly, proxy baptisms for the dead were part of early Christian theology, but a few hundred years after Christ's time, some committees or councils or whatever decided to remove it, so for most branches of Christianity the theology was changed to forbid it, though it's still present in a couple of branches.
Proxy baptism the way Mormons practice it does not solve the issue at all. The overwhelming majority of people who have ever lived are now lost to history. Are they not worthy of salvation?
Christians believe in baptism by desire for those who were never formally baptized, not proxy baptism. For example, in A.D. 256, Cyprian of Carthage wrote about baptism by desire. You can also read about it in certain catacomb encryptions. So it is clear from the beginning they believed in baptism by desire.
There were a few sects that believed in literally baptizing a dead body. But from the evidence we have today, proxy baptism was never mainstream or widely practiced. The idea salvation can only occur if you were lucky enough to have your genealogy recorded is far removed from mainstream Christianity.
> The idea salvation can only occur if you were lucky enough to have your genealogy recorded is far removed from mainstream Christianity.
As a practicing member of the religion in question, this phrasing misrepresents what we believe will happen if records are missing. I don't have a reference to material on hand (am on mobile), but our belief is that during the millennium after Christ's second coming, much work will be dedicated towards recovering records of individuals who were "lost", even by miraculous means if necessary. This is possible in part because such individuals themselves will have been resurrected.
Thanks for the clarification. If they are resurrected, couldn’t they be baptized themselves? No proxy necessary and no records need to be recovered. Just stand in line. Will there be millions of temples built to accommodate? Or is a temple not necessary for Baptiam?
> If they are resurrected, couldn’t they be baptized themselves?
Intellectual honesty here: I don't know the answer for certain. An interesting question! I don't see an obstacle to it, since baptism and resurrection are, I my understanding, independent events. More than happy to learn more myself to get you an answer, if you'll accept the raincheck. :)
> ...no records need to be recovered. ...
Records will still be necessary. Joseph Smith is very explicit in Doctrine and Covenants 128:6-9 about this, in that we interpret the power to "bind in heaven" as the power to present records of ordinances/rites like baptism that will be ratified by Christ as final. If there are no records of an ordinance like baptism having happened, then they'll need to be done again.
> Will there be millions of temples built to accommodate? Or is a temple not necessary for Baptiam [sic]?
I'm not sure on this either! I think both will be necessary. Baptisms for self need not a temple, though proxy baptisms have recently only been authorized in temples. I can see a world where the temple requirement gets relaxed, since there's historical precedent. Raincheck also, if you're interested.
> Do you also do proxy marriages?
We do indeed! There are four types of ordinances currently done in temples:
1. Proxy baptisms
2. Initiatories: washing and anointing as prep. for 3 (proxy and living)
3. Endowment (proxy and living)
4. Sealing (proxy and living); this encompasses marriages (sealing of a couple) and sealing between children and parents.
Church policies and administrative descriptions of these ordinances can be found at:
I’m really surprised the ordinance requires proof or it did not happen. You would assume it is doing something and that something can be checked. For example you don’t need proof of circumcision … just peek.
Is the Mormon God not all knowing and powerful? You would think God would know who has had what ordinance without the paperwork.
Not forbid, per se. Simply the theology of it was no longer considered to be grounded.
You can freely perform a proxy baptism - but the community around you is unlikely to believe that it has any effect whatsoever. Often because their theology does not have baptism as a requirement to enter into the kingdom.
Ah, thank you. I read an English translation [1] of the proceedings of the Council of Carthage (397AD) and it seemed to forbid it, but looking at it again, it seemed to forbid trying to give the eucharist to corpses (I'm not really sure what was going on there), and then adds a bit about baptisms for the dead, but maybe it's not forbidding them?
It's not "forbidding" something, really. "Shall not" could just as equally be translated to "it is inadvisable to", in most of these cases. The reason that is followed by reasoning of why such a thing is pointless, is because it is saying that something should not be common practice. It's setting a policy, not a regulation or law. A guideline for clergy to follow:
The reason for the act of communion and the dead? It was common at the time for someone purporting to be a Medium or related spiritualist or magician of some kind, to say that they could act as an intercessor. Sometimes with quite the hefty fee. They'd claim to distressed families that the Eucharist was required to save the family's deceased, and that through themselves the lost one could be saved.
In short, conmen are conmen. The church had plenty of con artists that they tried to work around. The church was telling their leaders not to engage with them, by making this particular policy. If the fees for Medium services had been less, then the policy probably still would have eventually been created, but it wouldn't have been part of such an important meeting.
It plays into the greater context of that particular Council - there were many people making claims to be bishops, or deacons, who were bringing with them a religion that was more syncretic in nature (combining existing religious beliefs), and the church was attempting to stamp that out and establish a structure to prevent it continuing. (Which they ultimately failed to do, as seen by the African diaspora religions).
Yeah FamilySearch also has a lot of links and relationships with other organizations, so it's a good starting point to tie a lot of other resources together. Once you get enough stuff put together to get hints of recently digitized records that match your tree, the research almost does itself, and you're just acting as the human in the loop making sure the connections it makes are well-founded.
The guy who mentioned LDS was spot on. I wandered into one of their "family research centers" once and they spent an hour with me, all free.
Unfortunately, as I've discovered myself, it is NOT true that everything is digitized. If it even is, it might just be the images (not OCR'ed).
I found my own family in the 1950 US census (just released), and I did it by knowing what street they lived on, and searching about 40 handwritten records from their "Enumeration District" until I found that street. And that's relatively recent, and it's in English.
Would be interesting to know if they’ve gotten into OCR solutions at all on their collection of documents. Worked for a company back in the day that sourced historical, public domain books from JSTOR, Google Books, etc. We used Abbyy to run OCR across all these old texts to provide highlighting in-app, text search, etc.
Took some tuning but we had good quality output across a variety of (mostly European) languages.
It's probably worth noting that some of those indexing efforts make more harm than good, there's a large chunk of Polish records which were "indexed" by people who clearly have absolutely zero knowledge of Polish, and the results are SIGNIFICANTLY worse than any OCR could have been. Always compare to source material to avoid surprises like that.
FamilySearch has a mobile app called "Get Involved" that does OCR and just has you confirm that it did it correctly. I used to do a lot of manual indexing for them when it was mostly based on sharing physical copies of documents, but I really struggled to read anything once it switched to mobile. Now the OCR is pretty good and just once in a while needs a human to recognize some weirder handwriting using cultural clues.
I spent a significant part of the covid period absolutely hooked on genealogy research.
As others have mentioned, (1) http://familysearch.com is excellent, incredibly good for being free, and (2) http://ancestry.com is also extremely useful. Yes the latter is paid and expensive, unfortunately. There is a significant degree of overlap between the two, but both tend to have some resources indexed (or indexed slightly differently) that the other does not. It will be difficult to do a serious search without using both to complement each other.
German records are fairly good from about the early 1800’s through the early 1900’s right up to the world wars. The wars mucked with things and for obvious reasons you will find families migrating to escape poverty, war, death, etc.
Some random tips:
* Remember that borders are not static. Name of places and even countries change over time and this was especially true of Germany during this time period. An invaluable tool to help disambiguate this is the Meyer’s Gazetter http://meyersgaz.org/
* Trace to at least 3 generations and 3rd cousins of your known connections, and look at the other trees connected to those individuals on ancestry.com. While user created trees are sometimes sloppy and should be taken with several grains of salt, it is often the case that someone else in the wider family already knows or has researched something, and it can be a good place to start pulling at threads before starting from scratch.
* Spelling of names can change through the years and across migrations. Learn to think phonetically and assume transcription errors happen frequently, both of the records and in the creation of the records themselves.
* Birthdates are just as bad as name transcriptions, finding matching records at +/- 2 years is relatively common, I usually search a person at +/- 5 years when starting out. This is especially true with adoptions, unfortunately.
* Because of the previous, family group matches (ages/gender) are at least as important as exact name matches. Ex a family with a vaguely similar family name, but dad, mom, and 7 children of the right age/gender, might be a match.
* For most of the older records there may be no census or similar. In this case it can be relatively same to assume groups of children clustered in the same place, with the same parent names, are probably in the same family. (Especially true when the parents marriage and all the baptisms are at the same church)
Another related hint to the vagaries of time in point 4 above -- years changed their start-date at various times, over the space of about 200 years, within Europe.
For example, if you were in England in February 1750, two months later it would be April 1751. This has lots of wonderfully weird knock-on effects while tracing your ancestors' history in that region.
As a more general tip - not specific to German records - I highly recommend using FamilySearch and Ancestry to identify sources, then looking for and confirming those sources at Archive.org.
Ancestry.com is a very well designed product with lots of data and a powerful network effect. I designed a search products for incident response data - also high volume, noisy but highly relational data set - ancestry’s design is very thoughtful.
The monthly subscription carries no commitment and you don’t lose data when not subscribed. So don’t think of it as “$xx per month commitment is so expensive!” But instead as “I’d happily pay $20 this month to support the research I want to do. Next month, we’ll see.” I’ve subscribed / stopped / resubscribed several times over the years as the time I have ebbs and flows.
That being said it's very US-centric - if you want to get materials from a specific region, turn to region-specific resources. For example when researching Poland, you would use local resources, maybe FamilySearch for source material, and MyHeritage for other people's trees. Ancestry is simply not very common and has even less resources than FamilySearch does.
In addition to familysearch.org, I'd recommend getting a DNA test from 23andMe or Ancestry. The relatives matching feature could give you additional leads.
DNA + genealogy is the only way to be certain of things.
If you are stuck, don't know much beyond a few generations and can't find the people you are looking for, DNA might be a big help. But DNA could open a can of worms, so be careful.
Newspapers.com is an interesting resource for stories about your family members here in the US, and some of the rest of the world. I learned that my Grandparents were the first couple married in a newly sanctified church, for example.
It's also fun to learn the history of the area in which you live. I've found it interesting to see the fairly large amount of history from the people who lived in this house in its 96 year history.
Just a reminder that much of this information, especially on the commercial databases the information is collated by well meaning people, but levels of accuracy differ vastly. Many people seem to find a name that they are looking for and with little further research/verification link it in with their family.
As with any research, if you want to verify the information, you have to go back to the original source, rather than rely on other peoples research ..
Arolsen archives are the primary place to look when you are looking for traces of slave laborers in germany or prisoners of concentration camps. When germany was defeated, a large chunk of surviving records was centralized there:
We (all the commenters here) are obviously related, if you could go back into the lost history far enough. I wonder how close some of us are. It's that 6 degrees thing that always sits in the back of my mind.
There's 2 different philosophies with these websites:
* One world tree where each person only appears once and all users contribute to collect as much details (usually with supporting documents) as possible for each person in the tree. Some genealogists hate these as they either don't want to share their (often costly) research with everyone for free or they had bad experiences with some users changing seemingly correct details to something else without providing proof.
* Several user-specific trees where each user has his own tree and can share it with selected other users or not. This also means that you might miss some details someone else found out about your tree's people. Those websites usually want a member fee for you to be able to see other user's trees and merge details from them.
These are the sites I know of:
* MyHeritage (user-specific trees) - very well known in Europe due to their excessive TV marketing, basically the gateway drug to genealogy here. But also lots of users that only tried it out once and thus have a very small tree only going back 1 or 2 generations. MyHeritage also matches your data with historic records and trees from other websites but wants to see money for you to manage those matches or copy details from other users' trees.
* Ancestry (user-specific trees) - never tried that one but I've heard they have one of the largest collection of scanned (by them) and indexed historic records and are a big preference amongst genealogists.
* FamilyTree (user-specific trees) - never tried that one
* FamilySearch (one-world tree) - see the other comments - it's a great resource and they even have an API (e.g. Synium's MacFamilyTree/MobileFamilyTree can sync data with FamilySearch). And it's free.
* WikiTree (one-world tree) - this free site "only" lets you build your tree but doesn't provide any own historic records. However, since users are encouraged to upload their records/proof and link those to their ancestors, you often find something. WikiTree also regularly has "competitions" where users are supposed to fill in details and climb to the top of the roster. Compared to all other sites the "Wiki" in "WikiTree" means that - apart from basic details like name and DOB/DOD - there's only a huge text field where you're supposed to add details in text form - like on a wiki page. If you use FamilySearch AND WikiTree, You can link your WikiTree data to FamilySearch and vice versa so it's clear those are the same person. The records also are publicly visible and appear on Google. Due to this I've been contacted by a few relatives I never knew about.
So for your research - apart from searching FamilySearch or visiting one of their research centres - I'd also suggest making free accounts at e.g. MyHeritage and/or Ancestry and add all the things you know, then wait whether a match pops up. If you're unsure about a date, make sure to set it to "Estimated" or "About" so the matching engine doesn't try to find an exact match.
One great source for genealogy however is the Church of the Latter Day Saints. They have well funded teams that research genealogy non stop. [1] I would just visit a local church and see if they can assist.
[1] - https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Latter-day_Saint_Online...