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Kevan Hansen's Map Guide 

to 

German Parish Registers

 

 

Genealogy Gems:  News from the Fort Wayne Library
No. 17, July 31, 2005
found by PML search

dated 1 August 2005

to the [email protected]

 

Kevan Hansen's Map Guide to German Parish Registers
by John D. Beatty

 

One of the vexing challenges for every genealogist doing research in Germany is dealing with geography. One may have the name of a village or town from a family Bible, passport, or other record, and may even be well-practiced using the Meyers Orts und Verkehrs-Lexikon des Deutchen Reichs to identify whether a town has a church. The town can then be searched in the Family History Library catalog for the availability of church and civil records.

link to:  Meyers Orts und Verkehrs-Lexikon des Deutchen Reichs, http://www.pgsa.org/researchguide.htm 

Invariably, however, a good genealogist will want to know more. What are the other parishes located near the primary ancestral parish? What are their boundaries? What villages were located within them? Did my ancestor have family connections in those parishes?

These are important questions, and when using microfilmed parish records, a thorough researcher will want to have a good handle on the geography of an ancestral area in order to look for clues in the records of other nearby churches. It is not at all uncommon to find German families spread out over more than one parish, particularly if they were agricultural laborers. Couples often found their future spouses in neighboring towns. A useful new research tool to address these questions is Kevan
Hansen's Map Guide to German Parish Registers series, published by Heritage Creations of North Salt Lake, Utah. Each of these volumes are devoted to particular German states and offer outline maps of parishes located within a particular Kreis or county. Thus, they are useful for determining the proximity of towns to other parishes in the area. In addition to offering clues about other possible records, they can "empower the researcher when confronted with the necessity of a radius search."

Regrettably, they are not useful for identifying tiny villages located within the boundaries of a particular parish, because the maps are simply not sufficiently detailed. A more careful search of Meyers and the Karte des Deutches Reiches map series (available on film from the Family History Library) may still be worthwhile.

At this writing, 10 volumes of the Map Guide are now in print, covering the Grand Duchies of Hessen, Baden, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Oldenburg and Schleswig-Holstein, the province of Hessen-Nassau and the Kingdom of Wuerttemberg. Additional volumes are planned for the rest of the German Empire, with the Rhineland expected soon.

Few German families lived in the isolation of a single village. Knowing what towns were located nearby will almost certainly help a researcher locate additional family connections in nearby churches

 


Another Good site:

http://members.cox.net/hessen/hesse.htm#Catholic 

 


 

Another Good site:

For research in Hessen Evangelical Church records, most records are
microfilmed and kept there. note by John..


according to a booklet issued by Landeskirchliches Archiv Kassel,
Lessingstr. 15A, 34119 Kassel, Germany.
Tel.: 0561/78876-0 Fax: 0561/78876-11
Webpage http://www.ekkw.de/archiv 
e-mail [email protected] 

they have microfilms:
Hattendorf Kirchenkreis Ziegenhain v.1720-1890
Hattendorf Kirchenkreis Ziegenhain see also 
Immichenhain Kirchenkreis Ziegenhain 1648-1877.

My last correspondence with them was in 2001, at which time they told me that the films can not be borrowed, but they
did recommend a genealogist (you know him from the Hesse-List at rootsweb.com

Gustav G. Eichbaum e-mail [email protected] 


 

The non-Catholic church records for Kirchhosbach are in Eschwege which was the Regimental seat for the Regiment Erbprinz during the time of the American Revolution.  The address is:
Kirchliches Rentamt Eschwege/Witzenhausen
An den Anlagen 14a
37254 Eschwege
Germany
(P.O. Box 1430, 37254 Eschwege)
e-mail: [email protected]


donated by: Bob Brooks


 

 

Some American Churches

 

There are earlier  HESS baptisms posted at this link for Goshenhoppen, which is in Washington Twp, PA:
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~reinsel/okeefe/goshb.html      

Also a HESS marriage there at this link:
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~reinsel/okeefe/goshm.html


Goshenhoppen, aka ST. PAUL'S MISSION, CHURCH OF THE MOST BLESSED SACRAMENT- It is Catholic.


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The Bayreuther Zeitung Newspaper
No. 58, 23 March, 1802.

Ansbach Regiment

Marie Rasnick Fetzer

Bob Brooks

Ansbach - Bayreuth Troops

Jochen Seidel

External Hessian Websites

   

 

TERM PDF as used by John Merz is not an Adobe electronic file, it is Personal Data File for an individual soldier.

 

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