One great source for genealogy however is the Church of the Latter Day Saints. They have well funded teams that research genealogy non stop. [1] I would just visit a local church and see if they can assist.
[1] - https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Latter-day_Saint_Online...
- Germany: https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Germany_Genealogy
- Ukraine: https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Ukraine_Genealogy
- Russia: https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Russia_Genealogy
Also see the main wiki page, which has a Locality finder and may have other links depending on how far back you want to go (e.g., German Empire): https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Main_Page
And of course, search the entire FamilySearch database too, which aggregates many, many sources: https://www.familysearch.org/search/
> Mormons trace their family trees to find the names of ancestors who died without learning about the restored Mormon Gospel so that these relatives from past generations can be baptized by proxy in the temple. For Latter-day Saints, genealogy is a way to save more souls and strengthen the eternal family unit.
Interestingly, proxy baptisms for the dead were part of early Christian theology, but a few hundred years after Christ's time, some committees or councils or whatever decided to remove it, so for most branches of Christianity the theology was changed to forbid it, though it's still present in a couple of branches.
You can freely perform a proxy baptism - but the community around you is unlikely to believe that it has any effect whatsoever. Often because their theology does not have baptism as a requirement to enter into the kingdom.
[1] https://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/wp-content/uploads/2022/...
The reason for the act of communion and the dead? It was common at the time for someone purporting to be a Medium or related spiritualist or magician of some kind, to say that they could act as an intercessor. Sometimes with quite the hefty fee. They'd claim to distressed families that the Eucharist was required to save the family's deceased, and that through themselves the lost one could be saved.
In short, conmen are conmen. The church had plenty of con artists that they tried to work around. The church was telling their leaders not to engage with them, by making this particular policy. If the fees for Medium services had been less, then the policy probably still would have eventually been created, but it wouldn't have been part of such an important meeting.
It plays into the greater context of that particular Council - there were many people making claims to be bishops, or deacons, who were bringing with them a religion that was more syncretic in nature (combining existing religious beliefs), and the church was attempting to stamp that out and establish a structure to prevent it continuing. (Which they ultimately failed to do, as seen by the African diaspora religions).
Christians believe in baptism by desire for those who were never formally baptized, not proxy baptism. For example, in A.D. 256, Cyprian of Carthage wrote about baptism by desire. You can also read about it in certain catacomb encryptions. So it is clear from the beginning they believed in baptism by desire.
There were a few sects that believed in literally baptizing a dead body. But from the evidence we have today, proxy baptism was never mainstream or widely practiced. The idea salvation can only occur if you were lucky enough to have your genealogy recorded is far removed from mainstream Christianity.
As a practicing member of the religion in question, this phrasing misrepresents what we believe will happen if records are missing. I don't have a reference to material on hand (am on mobile), but our belief is that during the millennium after Christ's second coming, much work will be dedicated towards recovering records of individuals who were "lost", even by miraculous means if necessary. This is possible in part because such individuals themselves will have been resurrected.
Do you also do proxy marriages?
Intellectual honesty here: I don't know the answer for certain. An interesting question! I don't see an obstacle to it, since baptism and resurrection are, I my understanding, independent events. More than happy to learn more myself to get you an answer, if you'll accept the raincheck. :)
> ...no records need to be recovered. ...
Records will still be necessary. Joseph Smith is very explicit in Doctrine and Covenants 128:6-9 about this, in that we interpret the power to "bind in heaven" as the power to present records of ordinances/rites like baptism that will be ratified by Christ as final. If there are no records of an ordinance like baptism having happened, then they'll need to be done again.
[0]: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-test...
> Will there be millions of temples built to accommodate? Or is a temple not necessary for Baptiam [sic]?
I'm not sure on this either! I think both will be necessary. Baptisms for self need not a temple, though proxy baptisms have recently only been authorized in temples. I can see a world where the temple requirement gets relaxed, since there's historical precedent. Raincheck also, if you're interested.
> Do you also do proxy marriages?
We do indeed! There are four types of ordinances currently done in temples:
1. Proxy baptisms 2. Initiatories: washing and anointing as prep. for 3 (proxy and living) 3. Endowment (proxy and living) 4. Sealing (proxy and living); this encompasses marriages (sealing of a couple) and sealing between children and parents.
Church policies and administrative descriptions of these ordinances can be found at:
- General Handbook, ch. 27: living ordinances: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/general-han... - General Handbook, ch. 28: proxy ordinances: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/general-han...
I’m really surprised the ordinance requires proof or it did not happen. You would assume it is doing something and that something can be checked. For example you don’t need proof of circumcision … just peek.
Is the Mormon God not all knowing and powerful? You would think God would know who has had what ordinance without the paperwork.
Of course! But twice in your comment you seem to be pushing back against points I didn't make. :)
> Christians believe in baptism by desire for those who were never formally baptized
Slight correction to the above: it's true that many branches of Christianity believe this, but definitely not all.
> The idea salvation can only occur if you were lucky enough to have your genealogy recorded is far removed from mainstream Christianity.
Of course! I don't know of anyone - including those that believe in proxy baptisms for the dead - that would agree with this idea, do you?
Unfortunately, as I've discovered myself, it is NOT true that everything is digitized. If it even is, it might just be the images (not OCR'ed).
I found my own family in the 1950 US census (just released), and I did it by knowing what street they lived on, and searching about 40 handwritten records from their "Enumeration District" until I found that street. And that's relatively recent, and it's in English.
But maybe you'll be lucky. Good luck.
Took some tuning but we had good quality output across a variety of (mostly European) languages.
An impressive number of typewritten documents from World War 2 were OCR'ed.
Volunteers do manual data entry and verification for documents that do not OCR well (called "indexing"): https://www.familysearch.org/indexing/projects
I should mention that the 1950 census DOES have a text search facility. It did not work for my family.
As others have mentioned, (1) http://familysearch.com is excellent, incredibly good for being free, and (2) http://ancestry.com is also extremely useful. Yes the latter is paid and expensive, unfortunately. There is a significant degree of overlap between the two, but both tend to have some resources indexed (or indexed slightly differently) that the other does not. It will be difficult to do a serious search without using both to complement each other.
German records are fairly good from about the early 1800’s through the early 1900’s right up to the world wars. The wars mucked with things and for obvious reasons you will find families migrating to escape poverty, war, death, etc.
Some random tips:
* Remember that borders are not static. Name of places and even countries change over time and this was especially true of Germany during this time period. An invaluable tool to help disambiguate this is the Meyer’s Gazetter http://meyersgaz.org/
* Trace to at least 3 generations and 3rd cousins of your known connections, and look at the other trees connected to those individuals on ancestry.com. While user created trees are sometimes sloppy and should be taken with several grains of salt, it is often the case that someone else in the wider family already knows or has researched something, and it can be a good place to start pulling at threads before starting from scratch.
* Spelling of names can change through the years and across migrations. Learn to think phonetically and assume transcription errors happen frequently, both of the records and in the creation of the records themselves.
* Birthdates are just as bad as name transcriptions, finding matching records at +/- 2 years is relatively common, I usually search a person at +/- 5 years when starting out. This is especially true with adoptions, unfortunately.
* Because of the previous, family group matches (ages/gender) are at least as important as exact name matches. Ex a family with a vaguely similar family name, but dad, mom, and 7 children of the right age/gender, might be a match.
* For most of the older records there may be no census or similar. In this case it can be relatively same to assume groups of children clustered in the same place, with the same parent names, are probably in the same family. (Especially true when the parents marriage and all the baptisms are at the same church)
For example, if you were in England in February 1750, two months later it would be April 1751. This has lots of wonderfully weird knock-on effects while tracing your ancestors' history in that region.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year%27s_Day#Acceptance_of...
The monthly subscription carries no commitment and you don’t lose data when not subscribed. So don’t think of it as “$xx per month commitment is so expensive!” But instead as “I’d happily pay $20 this month to support the research I want to do. Next month, we’ll see.” I’ve subscribed / stopped / resubscribed several times over the years as the time I have ebbs and flows.
DNA + genealogy is the only way to be certain of things.
It's also fun to learn the history of the area in which you live. I've found it interesting to see the fairly large amount of history from the people who lived in this house in its 96 year history.
As with any research, if you want to verify the information, you have to go back to the original source, rather than rely on other peoples research ..
* One world tree where each person only appears once and all users contribute to collect as much details (usually with supporting documents) as possible for each person in the tree. Some genealogists hate these as they either don't want to share their (often costly) research with everyone for free or they had bad experiences with some users changing seemingly correct details to something else without providing proof.
* Several user-specific trees where each user has his own tree and can share it with selected other users or not. This also means that you might miss some details someone else found out about your tree's people. Those websites usually want a member fee for you to be able to see other user's trees and merge details from them.
These are the sites I know of:
* MyHeritage (user-specific trees) - very well known in Europe due to their excessive TV marketing, basically the gateway drug to genealogy here. But also lots of users that only tried it out once and thus have a very small tree only going back 1 or 2 generations. MyHeritage also matches your data with historic records and trees from other websites but wants to see money for you to manage those matches or copy details from other users' trees.
* Ancestry (user-specific trees) - never tried that one but I've heard they have one of the largest collection of scanned (by them) and indexed historic records and are a big preference amongst genealogists.
* FamilyTree (user-specific trees) - never tried that one
* FamilySearch (one-world tree) - see the other comments - it's a great resource and they even have an API (e.g. Synium's MacFamilyTree/MobileFamilyTree can sync data with FamilySearch). And it's free.
* WikiTree (one-world tree) - this free site "only" lets you build your tree but doesn't provide any own historic records. However, since users are encouraged to upload their records/proof and link those to their ancestors, you often find something. WikiTree also regularly has "competitions" where users are supposed to fill in details and climb to the top of the roster. Compared to all other sites the "Wiki" in "WikiTree" means that - apart from basic details like name and DOB/DOD - there's only a huge text field where you're supposed to add details in text form - like on a wiki page. If you use FamilySearch AND WikiTree, You can link your WikiTree data to FamilySearch and vice versa so it's clear those are the same person. The records also are publicly visible and appear on Google. Due to this I've been contacted by a few relatives I never knew about.
So for your research - apart from searching FamilySearch or visiting one of their research centres - I'd also suggest making free accounts at e.g. MyHeritage and/or Ancestry and add all the things you know, then wait whether a match pops up. If you're unsure about a date, make sure to set it to "Estimated" or "About" so the matching engine doesn't try to find an exact match.