Von: zuli@sprintmail.com (Nelson R. Sulouff) Datum: 17.07.98, 12:07:55 Betreff: Locating German Ancestral Homes Rooter Friends, I have received from a new E-mail friend in Germany a useful method for trying to locate an ancestral home in Germany. Anyone with Internet access can do it. The method will be old stuff to some, but I have never seen the method described on this List, and I am sure the method will have been untried by many List subscribers. Occasionally we have the surname for an ancestral German with no idea of his or her home area or where to look for records in Germany. Most of us know the LDS (Mormon) International Genealogical Index (IGI) is a superbly useful tool to identify concentrations of an old surname in Germany. Another way is to analyze current phone listings, and many researchers have never tried to do this. Researching telephone listings works surprisingly well because German society has not been as mobile as that in the USA, and surnames have tended to remain in the same area for very long periods of time. Identifying current surname concentrations in Germany can point to where an ancestor lived centuries earlier. It is worth a try if simpler, easier methods have failed to locate your ancestor's hometown. I have been researching the surname Zulauf in Germany for over ten years and am still uncertain of the hometown for my ancestor who came to America in 1776. Recently I received a surprising and very welcome contact from Heinz Zulauf in Glashuetten, Germany. He was surfing for his surname on Internet and found my Webpage about the American immigrant Johannes Zulauf. After a couple of exchanges of E-mail between us, he performed a telephone analysis for the name Zulauf in Germany and sent me the results. It is opening up some new possiblities for identifying the hometown of Johannes Zulauf in Germany. Instructions on how to do this telephone research are detailed below. You may want to print out these step-by-step instructions to have them at your elbow if you try this method of research, especially if you have not worked with these kinds of tools before. ___________________________________________ 1. Go to Website http://www.Teleinfo.de/abfragen/bin/neuabfrage.pl 2. Scroll down until you come to the boxes for entering information (Warning: avoid being distracted from your purpose by the obtrusive ad which comes up on your monitor ). In the "Name" box, type the surname you are trying to locate, then go back up a line and click on "Anfrage starten." In a few moments a page will come up noting the NUMBER (in bold print) of times that surname is listed in German telephone directories. 3. To look at all the phone listings for that surname on screen, click again on the button "Anfrage starten." The entire list for all of Germany will come up. They are arranged according to postal code areas, lowest to highest numbers. The postal code number consists of five digits and it appears in front of the name of the town or city. (The longer number on the line below that is the telephone area code and the telephone number for the person.) You can just scroll through the list looking at the postal codes and decide where the most telephone subscribers are located, or you can send this whole list to the printer, which prints about 15 addresses per page. (For Zulauf there were 442 listings which required 29 printed pages.) 4. If you have entered a common name, you may not want to deal with the entire list. You can pare down the list by entering limiting criteria in the search boxes and doing another search. Go back to the page where you entered the surname in the box. In Netscape you can back up to that page by clicking the "Back" button in the upper left corner. Otherwise scroll to the bottom of the phone listings, click on the highlighted word "Anfrage," and a new search page will come up. 5. Do a new, more limited search by having the original surname in the "Name" box, and entering a number in the "PLZ" (postal code) box. If you noted on the complete phone list that the postal area beginning with the number "3" had a lot of phone listings for the name you looked up, just put a "3" in the "PLZ" field and hit the "Anfrage starten" button. You will be told the NUMBER of phone listings in the postal area beginning with "3." If you want to look at this more limited list, click the "Anfrage starten" button again. You will see that some towns in that postal area have many phone subscribers with the surname in question, while other towns may have very few. If there are a large number of addresses beginning with the numbers "32" in the postal code, do a new search limiting the results to the "32" postal code area. Perhaps you will learn that the next largest grouping will be in postal area "326," so you can run a new search with "326" in the "PLZ" field. You can keep identifying the area with the most phone subscribers until you get down to a relatively small area, and this may be at the center of your ancestor's home area. You should refer to a map to locate the towns in question in order to decide if that is a likely area and you want to pursue further research in that area. 6. Since Germans were very fond of repeating the same forenames within a family line, you might run a new telephone subscriber search, reducing the number of "hits" for a surname by entering the forname of your earliest known ancestor in that line. See how often that same forename name comes up in Germany. If there appears to be a concentration of phone subscribers in a given area with both the same forename and surname as your earliest known German ancestor, this might also turn out to be the provenance of your German ancestors. This method of analyzing current telephone listings in Germany yields only probabilities, not certainties. There's an old PA-Dutch saying, "It's better to look for potatoes in a potato patch than in a strawberry patch." So it's better to look in Germany for the provenance of your ancestors where you see the surname concentrated today than to look for their hometown where today there are only the surnames of others. If you try this method of looking for a surname in the German telephone directories and nothing turns up, the best thing to do is to try an alternate spelling, some spelling very similar to the oldest one you know, or a spelling that would have the same sounds as the oldest surname you know for your ancestor. Remember to take into consideration the German umlaut spellings for words which were often simplified in America (e.g., Huebbel > Hubbel and Hubble), and for the doubled "ss" in German which often became a single "s" or sometimes a "z" in America (e.g., Geiß -> Geiss -> Geis and Geise). If you have questions about the above outlined process for searching telephone listings send me E-mail, and if I get stuck with a question, my new friend, Heinz Zulauf in Germany, has told me he would try to help. I may have to refer a question to him and ask him to get back to you. Never give up without asking for help! Happy hunting, Nels /////////////////////////////////////////////////// Nelson R. Sulouff Raised in Pennsylvania; retired in Arizona ***************************************************** mailto:zuli@sprintmail.com http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Ranch/8094/ ftp://ftp.rootsweb.com/pub/usgenweb/pa/northumberland/xmisc/nels0001.txt Researching in Pennsylvania: EISTER, GEISE, KRIGBAUM, SULOUFF, SULOFF, SHULTZ, KUNKEL, WISE, NOETLING, BRANDT, HARDY, PARTNER, SPEDDY, CLINGER, HERTZLER, ARNOLD, GRAPES, GEISELMAN, etc. ***************************************************** Computers recycle used electrons that never wear out! ***************************************************** 3. On next page, click on "Telephone Book" (top left) 4. On next page, type the surname you want to locate in the "Name" box, scroll down and click on "50", then click on "search" 5. The page that comes up will tell you the number of times that surname is found in telephone listings for all of Germany.