German Roots: A Personal Search
Genealogical Lessons from the Field
A Visit to Schlitz, Germany
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My wife Cheryl is one of many Americans with a German background. In the summer of 2002 she and I traveled to Germany with the goal of finding documents that would provide information about her father's father. Cheryl was already the only person in her family who had ever traveled to Germany. She was now about to become the first ever to return to the Heimat (homeland) and the town of her paternal grandfather's birth to do genealogical research. She was also about to discover information that no family members had known before. I want to share with you the reasons our genealogical journey was a success—and why it might easily have been a failure.
Cheryl's maiden name is Kaufmann. Although no one in her immediate family speaks German, she grew up knowing that she carries genes from a long line of Germans on both her mother's Winkel side and her father's Kaufmann side. Cheryl, her two sisters and a brother grew up together in northern California occasionally hearing a few German words or phrases, attending Lutheran church services, and hearing quite a bit about the Winkel side of the family from their mother, less about the Kaufmann side, especially after their parents were divorced many years ago. Some information was a little sketchy, but Cheryl had met some of the Winkel relatives still living back in Wisconsin, and her mother had done some basic genealogical research on the Winkel side of the family. Before she passed away recently, Cheryl's mother loved to tell a family joke about how she came to be named Alice: When she was born, her mother had said, “Das ist alles.” (“That's all; that's the last one.”) And she did indeed end up being the baby of the family.
The Schlitz Town Hall
Standing on the Rathaus steps,
Cheryl proudly displays the results
of her German genealogy search.
Foto © Hyde Flippo
Cheryl had also heard a story from her father about how his father had left Germany for America because of a death in the family. She had always wanted to learn more about that sad event. Even though her father knew few details about his personal German heritage and the Kaufmann family history, he did know several vital facts. He knew that his father, Heinrich Kaufmann, had been born in a German town called Schlitz. He also knew that Heinrich had left Germany and arrived in Michigan in 1906 at the young age of 16.
He thus provided two essential pieces of information needed to locate a German birth certificate (Geburtsurkunde): (1) the place of birth and (2) the year of birth. (As it turned out, we didn't know the exact year, but more about that later.) Armed with those two items and a name, a German vital statistics document search has a reasonable chance of success. Although knowing the month and date of birth would have been even better, having the year (and location) is most important.
German Vital Statistics - English-German
birth certificate = Geburtsurkunde (die)
christening certificate = Taufschein (der)
death certificate = Totenschein (der)
marriage certificate = Heiratsurkunde (die)
office of vital statistics = Standesamt (das)
More > Genealogy Vocabulary
In any German family records search, the year of birth (or christening, marriage, death, etc.) will also determine where you need to start your search. In most parts of what is now Germany (remember, there was no “Germany” before 1871), vital statistics were kept by the church up to about 1874, and by civil officials beginning around 1875. But in Hesse (the German state in which Frankfurt am Main is located), the civil records began earlier, in 1856. In Heinrich Kaufmann's case, we knew he had been born in Hesse in or around 1890, which meant we needed to go to the Standesamt (office of vital statistics, civil registry) in the Schlitz town hall (Rathaus). But if we had needed to go to the church records, they might not have been in the local church. In many cases the church's vital statistics are kept in a central location such as the largest parish church — which may not be in the town where your ancestor was born or died.
In preparation for the trip, we needed to find Schlitz on a map. Since Schlitz is a small town of only about 10,000 inhabitants, a good map was needed. We soon discovered that Schlitz is located not far from and north of the larger city of Fulda, just a short side-trip off the A7 autobahn in the German state of Hesse (Hessen) and not very far from Frankfurt am Main. As it turned out, we actually drove there from Berlin—in about half a day with stops along the way. Since you can't get to Schlitz by train, renting a car was the best way to go.
On the next page I'll tell you how good luck and a friendly government official made our genealogical adventure a success.
NEXT > Interesting Discoveries in Schlitz
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