Dear fellow Germany Lover…
This page has been here for years, and the mail that comes through it is the best part of running the site.
A lot of it comes from people with German roots. Somebody’s great-grandmother left a village in the 1880s, and the name on the ship’s manifest turns up nowhere. Clerks on both sides of the ocean wrote down what they heard, small towns got swallowed by their neighbors in the reforms of the 1970s, and much of the east ended up behind a new border in 1945.
That part I can help with. Send me the spelling exactly as it appears in your family papers, misspellings included, plus the region if the documents name one.
What I can’t do is trace your family. Parish registers are a craft of their own, and full-time researchers will get you further than I could. But the village itself, what it’s called today, which town it belongs to now? That I’m glad to do. :-)
Then there are the travel questions. Where to go, what to skip, how much time a place actually needs. Ask away.
And if something here is wrong or out of date, tell me. The site has been online since 2007. Museums closed. Companies quietly changed their names. There are thousands of pages here and only one of me.
One more thing, and it matters more than I would have guessed: you can write to me in German. Sie oder du, ganz wie Sie mögen. Rusty German is fine. So is the kind you picked up from a grandmother who left long before you were born. ;-)
The form is right below. Check your email address twice before you send—one typo and my reply goes nowhere, and you’ll figure I ignored you.