Genealogy, what's the best website that will give me details on my family name?

Question:

Genealogy, what's the best website that will give me details on my family name?

The origins of my name include British, French, German and Polish...if that helps.

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: There isn't one site that will help you with all of them, but Ancestry.com is probably the best place to start.

Your British lines will be very easy. You'll need to educate yourself a little on how records were kept in different parts of the British empire (and that includes the colonial period of the US). You'll need to look at church registers (both Catholic and Anglican), civil registers, military records, land records, probate records, etc.

France is the hardest of the countries you have listed. Their records are not centralized and they're not really friendly to non-French speaking Americans in the western provinces (much better in the east and in the mountainous regions). You'll do better researching there if you have the names of the towns or the departements where your ancestors lived. It's not enough to say "Alsace-Lorraine" because they're two separate and distinct provinces who don't share records and have dozens of departements between them. Meuse is much different than Meurthe-et-Moiselle in what records are available and where they're housed. You really need to educate yourself before researching France and should probably plan that someday you're going to travel to France to do the research for yourself.

Germany is interesting and full of preconceived notions that most people need to put aside. First off, most of the records were NOT destroyed by the wars. The Germans were very meticulous record keepers. They didn't have one copy of a given record...they had 5-10 in many cases. There were copies in the townhall, then a copy in the regional archives, then a copy in the national archives, then a copy in the salt mines, and a copy with the military records unit. So copies of most records still exist. The only records where the originals are gone and much of the info lost with them are the visa records from the Port of Bremen. We still have the passenger lists, but we don't have all of the information telling us people's hometowns, etc.

Also, when researching in Germany and Poland you have to understand the political history of the region. Germany was not a unified country until about 125 years ago. Before that it was Mecklenburg, Prussia, Bavaria, etc. How records were kept in each duchy or principality was not standardized. When a census was done in one duchy, it might not have been done anywhere else. Many of these lands were strongly Catholic and records were kept by the priests, but others were strongly Protestant and all records were civil.

Understand how ownership of lands transferred. Austria used to have a border with France. The King of Spain also ruled the Netherlands and was the nephew of this king and the uncle of that king. The King of France married the daughter of the emperor of Austria-Hungary. Lands were transferred as dowries.

This gets particularly interesting as you research your Polish ancestors. Poland became a kingdom in the 1700s, then suddenly dissolved and was split into three parts. One went to the Russians and was a de facto slave state. One went to Austria-Hungary and was stripped of its dignity, but eventually they regained their presence. Those under the control of the Prussians (which would become the leading state of the unified Germany a few years later) were the earliest to be allowed to emigrate. You'll find them leaving Europe as early as the 1840s. The Galicians under Austrian control didn't start leaving until the 1880s with the government's blessing. The Russian Poles were the last allowed to emigrate and they're the majority of Poles you'll find in Ellis Island. The key to researching Poles is that the first record you want to pull is their Naturalization form. Look at the year of naturalization (it's at least 5 years after they arrived in this country...longer if they moved around a lot and didn't live in a given state for at least 18 consecutive months), then you want to look at their statement of allegiance. Pre-1906 the only thing on the form was "I disavow my allegiance to the King of Prussia" or "I disavow my allegiance to the Emperor of Austria-Hungary". The importance here is that it tells you which part of the partitioned Poland your ancestor came from and who ruled it when they left.

From here, pull all known census records on your immigrant ancestor. You're looking for clues like the year of arrival in the US, whether naturalized citizen or alien, place of birth of the person and of his/her parents, native language spoken. All of these clues are valuable in researching Poles. You will be happy if you see German Pole listed as ethnicity. That means they were Prussian Poles (western Poland...where records are opening up and even the Catholic Church has allowed the LDS to film their parish records and distribute them in the US). The Prussian Secret Archives are now putting their records online...HUGE.

Galician Poles (under the control of Austria-Hungary) are organizing their records and you'll find they're increasingly available to us online. Russian (East Prussian) Poles are the hardest to research. They might be Catholic or might be Orthodox. They might have their records in Lithuania just as much as they might be in Poland. You have to really get good at finding all of the infomation possibly available to you in the US before going over there for information. The good news is, though, that most Russian Poles came over after immigration reforms at the beginning of the 20th century so their Declarations of Intent and Naturalization petitions were full of relevent information, particularly the names of their parents and the towns of their births.

You won't many sites in the US that have good information on Polish or German ancestors. Some have Bremen and Hamburg passenger lists online, but that's the last step in their lives in Europe and hardly definitive.

Here's a great explanation of the Prussian Secret Archives from Everton Publishing's genealogists blog: http://www.genealogyblog.com/index.php?p...

Realistically, you should expect that your British lines will go pretty quickly and have records that are most easily available to you. France will be a headache until you find the hometown, then you can pull films from the LDS and not have to deal with the bizarre GeneaNet system in France (not at all like our Ancestry.com).

Germany does now have its own version of Ancestry.com at Ancestry.de. The nice part is that if you have the International Records membership in the US you can sign into the German site and use all of their records. Not all of those records are available on the American site. Of course they're also not in English, but the page is laid out similarly so you can figure out that Suchen is Search...

Poland is the place for you to educate yourself before tackling research of their records. Once you understand its history and who ruled/when/how, you'll be able to figure out where to look for the records you need.

One thing to remember whenever researching in Europe. Whenever you can use Catholic, Anglican or Lutheran church records to find your relatives go there FIRST. Pre-Revolutionary France had a common law that the parish priest was responsible for documenting births, marriages and deaths. Poland didn't have a well-educated population, but they had well-educated priests and ministers. They were the only literate people in many towns so the only reasonable records were documented in the churches. In mountainous regions, there might be 6 month windows where people living in a small alpine village might not be able to get away from their village, so whatever records might be in a canton archives are far sketchier than what the parish priest kept since he was snowbound with the villagers.

Britain actually used their censuses and civil registers to identify those pesky papists so that they could track them. Parish records (Anglican or Catholic) were the best kept records in many villages. Civil registers really tell us where to look for the records.

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BTW I should add that if your "French" is actually French-Canadian, you'll want to use the Loiselle Marriage Index and the PRDH from the Universite de Montreal.