Do you have European ancestors and you're not sure how to get started many
of our viewers in our live streams asked those questions all the time so I went
and I found an expert in European research and we're going to talk to him
next howdy I'm Devon Noel Lee with family history
fanatics and I'm going to talk with Miles Meyer about how to get started in
European research hi Miles how are you I'm doing fine how are you doing I'm
great okay so how many tips do you have for us on getting started Oh European
research is a broad field there's a lot of great tips out there my expertise is
in finding the archives that you might have some great information Church
records that might be out there or land records and many of the
countries have really great archival records that are available online
currently ok so tell me about your favorite archives to research and then
tell me about some that people are not using very much sure some of my favorite
ones just because of the quality of the information that's in them one of them
is Europeana and Europeana is a Europe-wide archive and it contains
world war 1 records as well as art and their greatest new piece is their
newspaper archives so it has newspapers from all over Europe and it's a really
great way of searching for your relatives there another one I really
enjoy is vos Rhine which is a southern Alsace Lorraine region and the reason
why I like that one is just the way the archive is laid out it actually looks
like you're looking at a bookshelf and you can pull you take the books right
off the shelf and you can go through page by page so it's divided up by birth
marriage death records and census records and you can just pull that book
and look right there most of my research that I'm doing currently is in the Baden
württemberg area in Germany I'm excited about that yeah and incredible church
records that are available in that archive once you know which town you're
and which parish your family is in you can then go right to those church books
and pull the pages and look for those names the baptism records the birth
records the marriage records for each of those individuals awesome now
as you can tell we're speaking English and some of the archives are European
and Baden württemberg how do you overcome that language barrier yeah so
many of the archives have an English translation of the webpage itself so you
can figure out where your search is and where to put the surname and the and the
dates and things that works out great I use Google Translate on the page I click
on the Google Translate button and it translates the page as I'm working
through it because those seem to be a little bit better than the English
translations written by the webpage developers okay but once you get into
the archive and starting look at the images those are all written in the
native language and it's really interesting because you're in let's say
the boss Ryan alsace-lorraine and you might be going through pages that are
written in Latin and you turn the page and it's written in German oh now and a
few pages later it's written in French oh goodness gracious so you have to be
able to find those other you know those languages what I always tell people is
know how your surname is written okay and look at the script that is used
during that period of time and just look for the surnames because they're usually
written in the in the margins of the document and so you can just search the
margins very quickly and look to see if that surname is written there oh that's
fantastic and so then when she find your surname on a document and in archive
collection then what do we need to do if we don't speak back Wayne yeah so I use
the genealogy translations page on Facebook okay and it's really great
they're very capable people that are helpful you can post an image of the
record you're looking for and within an hour or two most of them are translated
at least marginally so you can figure out what they say and there's some
really good pros in there doing the German records I've had a little problem
with Ukranian records oh now people that people don't like to translate those
quickly it's probably because there aren't that many people that are capable
doing the Ukrainian to to English translation okay but as long as you have
a more common language there they're easy to get them translated okay so give
it some tips about posting your trans though document you want translated into
Facebook to have more success that somebody wants to
translate it because I know there's some yeah nobody's going to do that other
than the fact that they may not speak the language but what are some is it's
dudes and Jones about posting a record you want translated so you always want
to make sure you get a clear snippet of the image so when you do your screenshot
you want to make sure you get a good image of that that you can upload into
the page but you also want to provide the link to where that source is oh okay
so that when somebody can't quite read what you have they can click on that
link they can zoom in on it and they can get better translation now many of the
archives are starting to do indexing so you can in the boss Ryan there's there's
a button says help us index these records and so if you're capable of
reading those you can index them right there oh that would be fantastic now I
heard you say a trigger word snippet yes I don't so expand on that
what does snippet mean and what is yeah and we're not going to be doing that so
if you're using a Windows computer and you have the snipping tool which looks
like a little scissors and little red circle around it that's the tool I use
because you can click on it open it up and just drag and drop over the corners
of your image and just take a particular image picture okay so you don't have the
whole page it's just the image at you okay so you want a snippet not 25 pages
right if we're going to go to 25 pages what do we need to do yeah so the
translators will do one page max they won't you know work on 1520 pages I had
somebody who said I have a whole journal what can I do like you might want to
paste like a paragraph at a time and just paste it together afterwards
if you have larger documents that's probably where you're going to get
somebody you know who is a native speaker and willing to do it you'll
probably have to pay them to do that okay so what are some it be Joe what are
some of the myths when it comes to European research that we need to avoid
the biggest one is the biggest when people come to me with is my family's
from alsace-lorraine well that's great but when you look at that region it's
three departments in France okay you have to know where in Alsace Lorraine
they were or they say I'm from Germany okay great what time period because the
boundaries in Germany changed constantly half and a lot of times we find people
say I'm Prussian my ancestors are Prussian and we find him
in the Polish archives because that's the region that they were in they were
at at that time got it so they were Prussian because that was the boundary
at the time but today that town is a Polish town and so you need to look in
the archives in Poland to find those records okay great
so in Baden and going building up what you just said so I know my ancestors
from Baden foreign, he migrated somewhere around 1852 I've looked for passenger
records can't find him he looks like he's came alone am I out of luck the one
thing I would look at is in the u.s. naturalization records a lot of those
will have some really great information but also in the immigration records I
found some immigration records that that go in and they have you know who was
your your nearest relative and what was a street address and so if you if it
says you know my father was so-and-so and here's a street address in the town
that gives you a great hint one of the records that I found really helpful is
if they came in in the later part of the 1800s they may have been recorded in
1914 in the alien papers in the United States because during World War one
German aliens had to register and May 10th
yeah and that contains records including like where your last residences were in
the last 15 or 20 years who your residents or who you were living with
who your family was in Germany and those are in the National Archives and many of
them are searchable online already these are such great tips so if you have any
more questions about researching in Europe be sure to use the comment
section of this video and throw down your questions and we will make sure
that miles is aware of them and respond to them but if they want to get ahold of
you off the YouTube platform where do they get ahold of you so I have a blog
it's miles genealogy mi le s genealogy at blog start blog spot.com but they can
also, email me it's milesmeyergmail.com and I'm on facebook you can
find me there there you go and we'll make sure that we put all of those links
to the websites that he recommended as well as to his own channels in the
description for this video Thank You mild so much thank you