Starting a family tree in Germany: where to find the records

In a drawer at your parents' house lies a family register book (Familienstammbuch) with a worn cover. Inside: your grandparents' wedding, 1951, a registry office in Westphalia, and the names of their parents. Without knowing it, you are holding the beginning of a family tree. This article shows you where to search next, and what of it is freely accessible in Germany.

The short answer

Start with what you have at home, and with the older relatives who can still tell you things. Older civil status registers are kept in the archives: birth registers after 110 years, marriage registers after 80 and death registers after 30 years. You request more recent certificates from the registry office (Standesamt), as a direct descendant. Before the time of registry offices, the church books (Kirchenbücher) take you further back, Protestant ones mainly through Archion, Catholic ones partly free through Matricula.

Step 1: start at home

The best sources are often in the house: the family register book, an ancestry passport (Ahnenpass) from the 1930s, letters, memorial cards (Totenzettel), photos with a note on the back. Ask the older relatives too. For each person, write down what you know for certain, and where it comes from. A tree without sources can no longer be checked later.

Step 2: the registry office and the archive

Registry offices have existed in Prussia since 1 October 1874 and throughout the German Reich since 1 January 1876. West of the Rhine, under French law, civil status registers were kept as early as 1798.

Register	At the registry office, then in the archive
Birth register	110 years
Marriage register and civil partnership register	80 years
Death register	30 years

This is set out in section 5 of the Civil Status Act (Personenstandsgesetz, PStG). Once these periods have passed, the registers go to the public archives, usually the city or district archive, and archive law applies. You request more recent certificates from the registry office of the place where the entry was made. Under section 62, this may be done by the persons themselves, their spouses and civil partners, and their ancestors and descendants. Others need a legal interest.

Step 3: before the registry office, the church books

Before the time of registry offices, parish clergy recorded baptisms, weddings and burials in the church books. How far back they go differs from place to place: in Westphalia most only begin after the Thirty Years' War, and the oldest there go back to 1563.

• Archion is the portal for Protestant church books, with more than 200,000 books from over 25 archives. It is a paid service, with passes for one, three or twelve months that do not renew automatically.
• Matricula shows Catholic church books freely online. Many dioceses are there, but not all German ones.

Free help: CompGen

The Association for Computer Genealogy, CompGen (Verein für Computergenealogie), makes its databases freely available: GenWiki with guidance on places and sources, GEDBAS with more than 20 million people from submitted family trees, around 950 online local family books (Ortsfamilienbücher), digitised address books and the casualty lists of the First World War. For beginners, this is often the best place to start.

Other sources

• Emigration: the Hamburg passenger lists from 1850 to 1934 (excluding 1915 to 1919) are accessible through Ancestry, which is a paid service.
• Soldiers of the Second World War: the former Deutsche Dienststelle (WASt) has been part of the Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv) since 2019. You submit requests through the Federal Archives website.
• Address books show where someone lived in a given year, and in what occupation. Many have been digitised, including at CompGen.

Software for your family tree

Gramps is free and open source. Legacy comes in a free basic version, though in English. Ages! and Ahnenblatt 4 are paid. All of them read and write GEDCOM, the exchange format for family trees. If you have received or created such a file, you can see for free and without an account on thememorypalace.ai/gedcom how many generations it covers, who the earliest known ancestor is and where the gaps are. The file never leaves your device.

From records to people

A certificate tells you when someone married, not what the celebration was like. That lives in the photos, the stories, the letters someone kept. In The Memory Palace, the tree comes in as GEDCOM and each generation gets a place next to its photos and stories, so that names become people again.