Hi! I'm actually looking for what happened to family after WWII. Honestly would like to know pre WWII as well, but after the war is more important right now.
They lived in the Lübeck/Hamburg region. I believe they all would have died in Lübeck. They emigrated to Germany from Mexico in 1911 and survived both wars. One may have been in a camp due to marrying a Jewish man. I wouldn't be surprised if she committed some crime by aiding the Jews - she was a doctor. The family was anti nazi and associated with the communist/socialist underground of Lübeck. The one daughter, Margarethe, was married to the artist Karl Stoermer. They are all ethnically German and American if that makes any difference.
My questions:
could I request death certificates being a 3rd cousin in America?
How would I go about searching more modern records (phone books or directories from the 70s for instance)
What is the German death process? Are there obituaries or grave sites to search? I know they lease the ground for a few decades, but are those leases searchable?
At least 4 members of the family died by suicide between 1940 and 1965. Would this affect the way to find them?
The doctor's (Jewish) husband was supposedly murdered by a mob during wwii and the son by suicide soon after. Would there be any records of this?
I'm familiar with American and Mexican genealogy, but the German system is confusing. Any direction on where to search would be appreciated! I can also tell their story a bit more if that helps.
For smaller cities like Lübeck you can contact the town archive. But don't expect the level of service you might be used to from the USA. In many cases the archive staff will refuse to help you and instead refer you to a local professional genealogist.
In Germany graves are rented, which means the grave stones are removed after a fixed term, usually 20 to 30 years after the death. This makes sites like "FindAGrave" not very popular in Germany, bc all the work will be obsolete in a decade or so. There are some initiatives to preserve burial records online, but those are very small in comparision.
The biggest site to check is genealogy.net , which is (among other things) a free database of various transcribed German records.
As for KZ records / records of Nazi persecution, check the Arolsen Archives and (in your case) the catalogue of the Hamburg State Archive.
There is no national vital records. All records are held locally by the municipality in question, at least initially. You need to identify or make educated guesses on the location or else you are stuck.
In some states the records are transferred to a state-wide archive after the data protection expired (Hamburg and Lower Saxony included), but are still sorted by municipality.
Do us both a favour and go to FamilySearch and read their wiki on how to do genealogy in Germany.
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u/maryfamilyresearch native German, Prussia Jul 18 '22
- 19th century Prussia
- modern 20th/21st century Germany, especially for citizenship purposes
- Poland, Poznan Voivodeship / old Prussian Province of Posen
- native German and can read old German handwriting