General Information
Cemeteries
The cemetery of Mähringen
Please be aware that there is quite a difference in the handling of cemeteries as in the U.S. The cemetery of a city in the very early days was close to or around the church. With the growing populations of the cities, this didn't work out any more, so the cemeteries were relocated at the outside borders of the cities.
Even with the cemetery being located outside, the graves are removed after a certain period of time. Normally after 25 year the tombs are removed and the space will be reused, if needed some years later. There may be family graves, which will stay longer than 25 years, but under normal circumstances you will not find any grave older than 100 years. This means you must have big luck, to find any tombstones from your emigrated ancestors.
German letters
Another complication you may face reading the old documents, can be the old German letters. Up to 1950 in Germany these special German letters have been used instead of the Latin letters you are used to. You will need quite a bit of training to read it. You can look for a True Type font called Suetterlin, which looks very close to it.
If you would like to try to read some text in the old German letters, it's the second page of a letter of one of my emigrants, Robert Eugen Kemmler, who has written it in 1892 to his friend Zindel.
After you have done your exercise, you can compare the results between your and my readings :-)).
German umlauts (Umlaute)
Not enough with the German letters. There are some special characters called Umlaute, which probably you are not familiar with. There are double points on top of a, o and u plus a special S character.
| Ä -- Ae | Ö -- Oe | Ü -- Ue | ä -- ae | ö -- oe | ü -- ue | ß -- ss |
Family sheets of the Protestant Church in Wuerttemberg
If you have a chance to look at Church records in Germany, especially for the Evangelische-Lutherische Kirche in Wuerttemberg (Protestant Church) you should look for the "Familienregister" (family register). These sheets will give you the best way to start, because it contains the information about the couple, the parents of groom and bride and their children. Normally you will find cross references to the preceeding parents sheet and the succeeding sheets of the children, if they married in the same parish. If the children have married somewhere else, you can in most cases find the date of marriage and the name of the partner. You can look at an example of a family sheet.
Normally these family sheets starts between 1750 and 1800 depending on the parish. From 1800 on you should definitely find them. If they are not available you have to look for the Taufregister (baptizm records), the Eheregister (marriage records) and the Todesregister (death register). To figure out family relations out of this records it's a real tough work, because you only have portions of information, which you have to bring together. Very often there are multiple families with the same names. You have to be very cautious in making the relations otherwise you may be very quickly on the wrong tracks.