Germany locating civil registration records not at the Family History Library

Birth, marriage, and death records may be found by contacting or visiting German civil registration offices or archives. To protect the privacy rights of living persons, most modern records have restrictions on their access and use. Use search engines, such as www.google.com, to enter the name of your town and find town web sites with contact addresses, etc. Germany has no single repository of civil registration records. A person's records may be found in one or more locations.

Local towns.
Most civil records are still maintained by the civil registration office in the local towns. Older records may be at the local office or in the town archives. The records are not public, but descendants can obtain extracts or copies. You can usually obtain civil registration records by writing to the town. Civil officials will usually answer correspondence that is written to them in German. Your request may be forwarded if the records have been sent to an archive or central repository.

City archives.
Large cities have many civil registration offices. Most civil registers are still located at the local offices, but some are collected in city archives. Many German cities have established archives to preserve their older records. Often they cannot handle genealogical requests, but they can determine whether specific records are available for you or your agent to search. State archives. Duplicate registers from some towns are kept in state archives. Many of these records have been microfilmed and are available at the Family History Library. However, for more recent records and for those not yet microfilmed, you may write to the state archives of Germany and request searches of the records. See Germany Archives and Libraries. If the archivist cannot do the research your request, you can hire a professional genealogist to search the records for you. You may also find archive inventories that describe the record-keeping systems and available civil registration records in Germany (see Germany Archives and Libraries). These and other guides are found in the Place Search of the Family History Library Catalog under: GERMANY - ARCHIVES AND LIBRARIES GERMANY, [STATE] - ARCHIVES AND LIBRARIES After deciding who has jurisdiction over the records for the time period you need, write a short request to the proper office. Be careful not to ask for too much when writing German archives. They can briefly answer questions about the records in their collection, but often they are reluctant to do research in these records. You may have more success if you ask for a referral or a list of local researchers you could hire to search the archive's records. See the German Letter-Writing Guide for more information about writing letters to Germany.