The previous note by Craig Kilby is continued by him:
First, the German families I was researching were 19th century immigrants to Missouri -- not Germanna people. The church record books here (St. Louis) very often contain detailed listings of the town of origin of a church member. These are most often found in the death and burial records, but also in the christening entries. There is no better source than this for such detail. Finding the church a German ancestor belonged to is vital. A typical entry might read "Buried 10 January 1878, Herr Heinrich Schmidt, baker, aged 78 years, 10 days, third legitimate son of Hans Schmidt of Borgholtzhausen and his second wife Anna Maria Mueller." Armed with this type of information, it is not too difficult to find your ancestors in Germany. Concordia Seminary in St. Louis has a good collection of old Lutheran Church record books from across the USA. By no means complete, but still a formidable collection. (It is up to each Synod whether to send this to Concordia or not).
The names of towns may have changed. And in particular, the "country". We need to keep in mind there was no such thing as "Germany" until 1871. Prior to that, "Germany" was a patchwork of principalities, kingdoms, duchies, etc. Prussia, of course, under Frederick the Great in the 1700's, was the largest and most powerful of the German Kingdoms, and it was under Prussian leadership that the modern nation of Germany was forged under Otto von Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm I.
I mentioned the trip to Beilefeld Regional Library when I went with a Notary Public to access the church records of the local parish of Borgholzhausen. His name was Martin Maschmeier and without him I would NOT have been given access to these records. He had "credentials," you see, to let me in. He was interested in helping for a variety of reasons. One was that he had a genuine interest in these families, since he was writing a book on the "Auswanderers" to Missouri himself. (A man much like Michel and de Graffenried, one Gottfried Duden, wrote many prolific tracts to his fellow Germans in the 1830's, extolling the virtues of Missouri, particularly St. Charles County, where Daniel Boone died. He was extremely successful in recruiting Germans to move here. Hence, the Boone-Duden Society in St. Charles County, MO.) Second, he was a publicity hound. Unbeknownst to me, he arranged interviews with several local newspapers and radio stations featuring my visiting and doing genealogy. Of course Martin appeared prominently in all of these publicity stunts. So the lesson here is to find a good local researcher who has access to the records you want to see.
Craig Kilby
(21 Jan 02)
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.