For genealogical research, German-language newspapers are at least as useful as their English language counterparts. Astonishingly, there are now approximately 2,000 historic German-language newspapers online at numerous public, private, and commercial websites. The combined newspapers (fifty years and older) comprise billions of pages and refer to millions of individuals. Since most of these digitized papers are fully searchable, this guide to the newspapers, indicating newspaper title, place of publication, date range, and website, is a key to a mother lode of information found in German-language papers and is a revolutionary new tool for German genealogy research.
Most of the papers cited are from Germany and the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, though there are papers cited here from as far afield as China and Oklahoma. Citations range from large papers to small, from dailies to weeklies, national papers to local papers, even trade papers, government papers, and occupational papers for saddlers, railroad men, gardeners, bookbinders, and tailors. A single site hosted by the Austrian National Library, for example, has digitized millions of pages in hundreds of titles from Austro-Hungary, with the years 1700-1875 now almost fully digitized, as are World War I newspapers from 1914-1918. Hundreds of other websites are hosted by libraries, universities, museums, and institutions, many with English language interfaces.
Your German genealogy research will not be complete until you have thoroughly examined all of the resources available–and that includes a search of German-language newspapers. Astonishingly, there are more than 2,000 historic German-language newspapers online at numerous public, private, and commercial websites. The combined newspapers comprise billions of pages and refer to millions of individuals. This book will help you discover all digitally available German-language newspapers 50 years or older, search them by location and title, and narrow down the dates for which they are available online. The genealogical information you can find in these newspapers is almost limitless. It includes notices of births, marriages, and deaths from civil registrations; baptisms and wedding announcements from churches; intentions to emigrate; trade news; lists of pupils; appointments to office; promotions, transfers, and retirements; deaths and estate sales; lists of hotel guests; and a multitude of everyday notices.
Since the first edition of this book was published in 2014, a great many more historic German newspapers have been digitized, prompting the need for this enlarged second edition, which is nearly 100 pages longer than the previous edition. The book’s coverage is quite literally worldwide. Of course, by far the largest number of German-language newspapers online are from Germany, followed by Austria, then present-day Poland. But more than two dozen other countries throughout the world are represented, including Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Egypt, Estonia, France, Georgia (country), Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, Norway, Paraguay, Russia, Samoa, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Switzerland, Tanzania, Turkey, Ukraine, and the United States.
Whether you are a genealogist, family historian, demographer, migration researcher, or social historian, you’ll find that these newspapers are extremely useful resources.
Ernest Thode
2018, paper, 330 pp.
ISBN: 9780806320922
102-5760
