ROOTS & BRANCHES

Less than two years ago, well-known German genealogy researcher Andrea Bentschneider launched the German Genealogy Collective with the goal of matching up people with German-speaking ancestry to the presentations, virtual get-togethers and resources that might help them solve their family history brick walls.

She recently has been promoting her series of what she calls “German Genealogy Essentials Research Guides,” including several about the massive Germany-based website Compgen.de, which has a number of features that are helping to those seeking German roots.

Also in the series are guides to Archion.de, the mega-site with mostly Protestant church records from Germany, as well as one on Matricula.eu, which has Roman Catholic church registers from areas of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire as well as an increasing number of records from German Catholic dioceses.

Bentschneider’s guide on Archion.de is a comprehensive electronic document running more than a hundred pages going over everything about this subscription site.

It explores everything from the background of the website (it was a creation of a subsidiary of Germany’s national union of regional Protestant church bodies)  to giving step-by-step “how to” directions for everything from logging on to the site, changing the language in which its text appears, and accessing the images of the church books.

Crucially, the guide runs through options to get to the right parish’s records, and also gives a great rundown on the controls to lighten, darken, make larger or smaller, and now even transcribe the records.

That last item—in which users can request the artificial intelligence tool Transkribus to “read” the handwritten script of the records—is a new feature on Archion.

The guides so far on Compgen.de one  on the electronic village family history “books” called Ortsfamilienbücher or OFBs for short.

I was especially interested in the OFB guide, and Bentschneider has provided a good step by step for this section of Compgen. These OFBs are usually done by expert genealogists and historians by compiling all of the older records of a village into family groups, and Bentschneider shows how to navigate from one family to another (and even one OFB to another since some families are found in more than one village.

If there’s any flaw to Bentschneider’s guides, it’s only that they don’t mention similar records beyond the strict scope of the guide; for example, the Archion guide mentions FamilySearch.org only in passing even though it has many of the same records available for free; and from her OFB guide, one might think that they sprang full-blown aa a concept on Compgen rather than an electronic continuation of printed books on some villages that have been published for decades.

Bentschneider’s “master class” presentations and other facets of the Collective continue and are excellent bargains for those with German ancestry. The guides are available to members and non-members of the Collective.

To learn more about the German Genealogy Collective and become a member, go to the URL: https://germangenealogycollective.com/