ROOTS & BRANCHES

Whether you are personally religious or not, learning about ancestors’ membership in a church (or lack thereof) is often one of the most important facets of genealogical research.

While it’s often impossible to know exactly how someone actually felt about their faith – unless he or she was one of the minority of people who wrote down those feelings (and had that writing preserved in some way), we are dependent upon less personal records such as the frequency with which they appear in communion records or whether there’s documentation for all of their children being baptized.

But whether we know about those innermost feelings or not, religious records are important simply because, especially in European states, they were the de facto civil registers for centuries before such state-required recordings of births, marriages and deaths became commonplace in the 19^th century.

One of things I often stress in contrasting the ways of researching the two great waves of German immigration to America – the “first boat” of Colonial times vs. the “second boat” of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries – is that those researching the first wave almost never have to deal with actual German civil registration records since they did not start in many parts of Germany until the 1870s.

A goal of those with immigrant ancestors in the second wave, for whom research in the civil registrations can be productive, will be to trace the pedigree back to the point at which only church records exist.

And that’s why learning an ancestor’s religion can be important; in some ways, it might be the most crucial “fork in the road” in your research.

Why this is the case requires some background information.

The religious wars that followed the Protestant Reformation of the early 1500s resulted in two settlements (the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 and the Peace of Westphalia in 1648) in which the rulers of the German states were each allowed to pick a religion (between Catholicism and Lutheranism in the first treaty and between those two and Reformed Calvinism after the second treaty) to be the established church in that state.

While the theory of this was expressed as “whose realm, his religion,” in fact, a fair number of the rulers chose some sort of toleration within their realms.

Nevertheless, Catholics and Protestants weren’t evenly distributed in the German states, which brings us back to that “fork in the road.”

Knowledge of an ancestor’s particular faith, when combined with knowledge of which German states in that time period had majorities of that faith, may lead you to the right part of Germany.

For example, both the Palatinate in southwestern Germany and Bavaria in the southeast were referred to as “Bayern,” the German-language name for Bavaria because they were politically united) beginning in the late 18^th century. But the religious makeup of the two areas was markedly different, so if an ancestor from “Bayern” was Protestant, likely they came from the Palatinate part of Bavaria while if they were Catholic, likely they were from the southeast.