archion.de

Archion.de is my favorite German genealogy site. It has Lutheran Church records and some of the records are early German Church Records. I struggled to add any information to my German Grandmother’s family, you can read about my journey into German genealogy here, https://ellajaneanne.home.blog/2019/06/30/my-journey-into-german-genealogy/

I learned about archion.de at a conference and signed up to search it but was unsure how to locate my family. I was able to find some information about family I already knew about but not add any new information or names. As I struggled to search, I moved on to other ancestors, I forgot about archion.de and kept trying to search other sights, like ancestry and family search. While both ancestry and family search has wonderful records and lots of information, I was not finding anything on my Germany family.

In 2017 I had the wonderful opportunity to travel to Kassel, Germany, where my grandmother and her family are from. You can ready about my trip to Germany here, https://ellajaneanne.home.blog/2019/07/01/after-traveling-to-germany-for-family-history-research-this-is-what-i-learned/ .

Leaving German without learning more about my family was a disappointment. I loved the time I spent there and felt very close to my grandmother. The one goal I had was to add to my family tree and I had failed at finding anything. Once the disappointment wore off and I decided to search again I found my 3rd great grandfather’s, Jost Heinrich Gossmann’s, parents. I finally had added to my family tree. This is where https://www.archion.de/ comes in. I was figuring out where and how to search. Archion is not indexed so it is searching through the images and hoping to find my ancestor. I spent hours looking at the images and finding so many ancestors I could not keep up. When I traveled to Germany I had all I knew about my grandmother’s family in a one-inch binder. Today I have two, three-inch binders, and am getting close to having to split those, I have so many documents, mostly found on archion. I print each page and make notes of my translating.

Even though I felt in the beginning, it was hard to search on archion, it is relatively easy. You do need to know exactly where in Germany, your family is from. An example is, my grandmother is from Kassel and while it is good that I know that, most of her family was actually from Wehlheiden, Kassel, Germany and Kirchditmold, Kassel, Germany. If I only knew Kassel it would have made my search a lot harder than it was. The nice thing about archion is, you can create a free account to view the records they have available. You will not be able to view the actual record until you pay.

The cost of archion, in my opinion, is not too bad. The thing that is different on archoin is that depending on what package you buy you only get so many downloads. The first month I had it I ran out of downloads and created a new account with a different email so I could download more.

I usually book the 1-month private user. I do this because sometimes I have more time to work on my genealogy than others. I want to be able to spend as much time as I can when I buy a monthly subscription to archion.

The two oldest records that I have found. It is the marriage record of my 5th great grandparents, Johann Daniel Thieleman and Margaeret Elizabeth Wachenfeld Married 31 January 1790 in Zierenberg, Wolfhagen, Kassel, Germany. To realize that I added two generations to this line of my family makes me happy that I did not give up searching. I was able to visit Zierenberg this year and you can read about my visit here https://ellajaneanne.home.blog/2019/09/16/zierenburg-germany/

Most of the records are arranged by type, KB (which are church books) they generally are in order and contain baptism, confirmation, death, and marriage. They also have separate books for each baptism(tauf) , confirmation(konf), death(tote) and marriage(trau). The words in parenthesis are the abbreviation in German for each type of record. I use google chrome to open the page and use the translate page option to help read the web page, too bad this does not work for the actual documents. Even with translating the page sometimes the German abbreviations are not translated.

For the most part, my archion searches have all been in Kassel. I have had a couple of opportunities to help a friend and searched in other areas of Germany.

As you can tell I love arhion and am so grateful that I have been able to add to my German family. This has been such a struggle for me. Archion is a relatively new website and a new project to scan all the Lutheran records in Germany. You can follow them on facebook ( https://www.facebook.com/ARCHION.de/ )where they update with new records that they add. So if your records are not there today be sure to check back. They are adding lots of new records.

If I can help anyone with their German search feel free to email me at dbigham72@gmail.com.