Finding your German ancestors

Civil registers: from which year

Before these dates, the church books are the only source.

Standesamt or archive? The 110, 80, 30 rule

Since 2009, German registry offices keep their registers for a fixed time, then hand them to the public archive (§ 5 of the Personenstandsgesetz):

• Births: 110 years
• Marriages: 80 years
• Deaths: 30 years

So a birth from 1890 is usually in the town or state archive, not at the Standesamt. The archive issues copies, for example €10 for a certified copy and €5 for a simple one at the Bayreuth city archive. Many small offices merged in the 1970s: check which office covers the village today.

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Church books

Lutheran parishes kept registers from about 1540, Catholic parishes from 1563 and Reformed parishes by about 1650. Many early books were lost in the Thirty Years' War. Originals stay in the parish; duplicates are in state or church archives. Catholic books are in Latin or German.

• Matricula: free online Catholic registers from German, Austrian and other dioceses.
• Archion: over 200,000 mainly Protestant church books, with paid passes (€19.90 for a month, €52.20 for three months, €178.80 for a year).

Civil registers online

Some state archives publish civil registers free. The Landesarchiv of North Rhine-Westphalia, for example, shows images at archive.nrw.de: in 2022, Westphalian deaths to 1938 and marriages to 1899, with the Rhineland partly online. Check the state archive of your ancestor's region.

German emigration

About 600,000 people left between 1815 and 1848, around 90% for the United States; about 2 million between 1850 and 1870; more than 1.7 million between 1880 and 1893; and about 564,000 from 1894 to the First World War. Between 1850 and 1891, 41% sailed from Bremen and 30% from Hamburg.

Sources