LECTURE TITLE: Finding a German Heimat Online
SESSION NUMBER: F342
TIME & DATE: 2:30 p.m., Friday, 4 May 2018

Finding the location of a German-speaking ancestor’s home village (or Heimat in the mother tongue) is crucial to success in extending your pedigree generations-deep into Europe. While the place names of these sites sometimes are passed down to the present, more often they are not – or the place name has been garbled through the years.

To the rescue is a growing constellation of online records supported by tried-and-true methodologies. Whether it’s attacking the many American-based records that may show an immigrant village of origin (ranging from church registers to naturalizations to German-language newspaper obituaries) or exploring the mushrooming Germany-based site Compgen.de, more and more of these records can be found on the Internet. Come learn about these resources and how to use them to help your research.

Special Note: In addition to speaking, James Beidler will be an exhibitor at the conference and available in the exhibit hall to answer questions all four days of the conference.

ABOUT:
James M. Beidler is the author of the newly published The Family Tree Historical Newspapers Guide and writes “Roots & Branches,” a weekly newspaper column. He is also a columnist for German Life magazine and is editor of Der Kurier, the quarterly journal of the Mid-Atlantic Germanic Society. Beidler has also authored of two successful previously published German genealogy books, The Family Tree German Genealogy Guide and Trace Your German Roots Online.