We were talking about some source books in the German language for help in finding an ancestor in Germany. We are trying to make the needle larger, or the haystack smaller.
The Deutsche Geschlechbuecher is a set of more than two hundred books, some of which are specific to a certain part of Germany. The Family History Library in Salt Lake City has a CD-ROM that indexes the volumes and pages where each surname is found.
The Deutsche Familienarchiv is a collection, still growing, of compiled genealogies. Currently there are more than a hundred volumes indexed in book form.
The Quellenschau fuer Familienforscher has three volumes and is an index to some two thousand German periodicals, records, and resources, and was compiled in 1938, thus predating Der Schuessel .
Familiengeschictliche Quellen is a compilation started by Oswald Spohr as a periodical index and as a bibliography of German genealogical publications.
About five hundred fifty periodicals have been indexed in Der Schuessel , Quellenschau fuer Familienforscher , and Familiengeschichtliche Quellen . About three-quarters of these titles can be found in the Family History Library.
All of these resources are in German, but most follow a template that makes it relatively easy for a non-German speaking researcher to use.
Most of these collections are oriented toward people who stayed in Germany, so it is not overly likely that researchers with Eighteenth Century German immigrants to America will find their ancestors; however, these resources do point the researcher to villages in which their ancestor's surname was found.
(14 Apr 05)
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.