Brandenburg, German Empire Church Records

Berlin Evangelical Parish Jurisdictions
Research in Berlin is complicated by the great size of the city and the large number of parishes. There is a | Berlin Parish Street Guide register available online that will help you determine which parish your ancestor attended. Once you are at this website, click on the following:

Research Tools Country Websites German Genealogy Research German City Street Indexes Berlin Evangelical Parishes

Before using this site, it will be necessary to locate your ancestor's address in Berlin. Use the Berlin address books online or available at the Family History Library on film to do this.

How to use the Berlin Address Books
The directories are divided in sections. Of greatest genealogical value are the alphabetized listings of city inhabitants with addresses. Search for your ancestor under the alphabetical listing of names in the time period your ancestor lived in Berlin. When you find your ancestor listed, write down the street and house number where he resided. Then turn to the listing ot that street in the Street guide at the link above to determine which parish he attended in the years closest to the time period that you know he lived in Berlin.

Other sections of the directories are businesses, public offices, societies, inhabitants' addresses listed under the street they resided, rather than alphabetically by their name. The suburbs of Berlin were in many, but not all of the directories.

Berlin Suburbs
Baumschulenweg (Treptow), Boxhagen-Rummelsburg, Britz, Charlottenburg, dahlem, Friedenau, Friedrichsberg, Friedrichsfelde, Grunewald, halensee, Heinersdorf, Hohen Schönhausen, Karlshorst, Lankwitz, Lichtenberg, Groß Lichterfelde, mariendorf, Nieder-Schönhausen and Schönholz, Nikolassee, Ober-Schönweide, Pankow, Plötzensee, Reinickendorf, Rixdorf, Schlactensee, Schmargendorf, Schöneberg, Schönholz, Steglitz, Stralau, Südende, Tegel, Tempelhof, Weißensee, neu-Weißensee, Westend, Wilhelmsberg, Wilmersdorf, and Zehlendorf.

About the City Address Directories
The directories on film can be found here. The online link can be found at this site Berlin City Directories. The directories begin in the year 1799 and continue through 1943 online and on film. The address books have a section arranged by streets and house numbers within a street and have a graph showing different jurisdictions, such as poverty assistance office, orphanages, school districts, court districts, parishes, police districts, and postal districts. The directories for some years also include the voting districts. These street indexes within the address books are the source of the Street guides that are found at the above link.

Street indexes were included in the address books from 1874-1925. After 1925 parish jurisdictions are listed in parish indexes. in this system each parish is listed alphabetically with the streets and house numbers which are assigned to it. Occasionally street indexes note more than one parish for an entire street or certain house numbers within the street. In such cases, the inhabitants apparently had a choice of attending any of the parishes listed.

The format of the street indexes varies from year to year. For example, some directories list parish jurisdictions by house humbers; others list the jurisdictions by a street to street description such as "From Krupp street to Perleberger". In such cases there is no way to cross reference the descriptive and house number entries, therefore the descriptions are listed in this register as they were listed in the orignal street indexes.

Some streets were named only with a number, such as Street 19 [Straß 19]. There appears to have been some inconsistency in the way these streets were listed from year to year. In some cases there seems to be duplicate usage of certain numbers and the actual parish jurisdictions are not always clear. It may be necessary to check each of the parishes associated with the street number. These streets named by numbers only, was not included in the 1917 directoory.

Some streets did not exist in earlier years, but apparently came into existence as new housing developed. Other streets are listed in the earlier street indexes but are not listed in the later ones. It is not certain if these omissions were accidental or if the street names were changed or discontinued. It is also possible that there were no residences on those streets in all years covered by directories. For this reason, parish jurisdictions may not be listed for all streets in Berlin for all years in the street guide registers.

For residents on streets near the train stations [Eisenbahn], look under the heading of Eisenbahn for the specific train station needed.

The Cathedral [Dom] did not have any specific streets assigned to it. So you should check the cathedral records for births, marriages and deaths if your ancestors are not found in the records of their assigned parish. The Charite parish also has no streets assigned to it, but was a part of Sankt petri parish. The Family History Library has records for botoh the Petri and Charite parishes and the Dom parish.

Spelling and Alphabetization
The inconsistant spelling of street names from one directory to the next is a problem. In the cases wehre alternate spellings were used, such as the street name of "Colonie" which is also listed as "Kolonie", they are listed twice in the Street Guide for easier reference. Other variations in street names are handled the same way as in the case of "Ostbahnhof" which is also listed as "Am Ostbahnhof".

In the original street indexes the street called "Unter den Linden" is listed as "Linden, Unter den". The Street Guides lists these types of localities as "Unter den Linden". This method was applied consistently also for "Am, An der, Alte, Neue, Hinter dem, Klein, Groß, and similar prefiexes on street names. Words with an Umlaut were alphabetized in the Street Guides as though there were no Umlauts.  The German letter "ß" os a;[jabetozed as "ss".

Berlin Street Guide Parish Abbreviations
The following chart is a list of Berlin parishes included in the Street Guide Register:

A single asterisk * indicates that some records of the parish have been microfilmed and are available for research at the Family History Library and Family History Centers. A double asterisk ** indicates that tsome or all of the available records have been extracted through the LDS Church Extraction program.

Although there are many other parishes in Berlin, they were not included in the book because the information was not available: they were not listed in the street indexes of Berlin; and no other sources available provided the information necessary to identify the parish boundaries. Perhaps some of them were smaller denominations and may have had only one parish in the city which served the entire city of Berlin. Other parishes which were not included may have served specific groups of people such as the military parish, the orphan's parish and prison parish.