Finding my Prussian family?

Question

I'm so frustrated at this point. I was making progress but now I'm completely stuck and I have been for about a year. GGRRR!!! It seems like my family just popped out of the ground in Wisconsin and NEVER lived anywhere else!!! I'm lost. It says they were born in Hannover Prussia, but I just can't find any immigration records or anything!!

What's my next step, or should I just start over with my grandpa and work backwards from there? *sigh*

Have I gotten to the point where I should subscribe to Ancestry.com?

Answer 1

Yes.  Ancestry.com will help.  You can also find others looking for the same family.  I have found some long lost cousins through Ancestry.com.

You can ask here for help as well.

Answer 2

You're probably not going to get anywhere with Ancestry.com either. The reason is that you have the province of Prussia that they came from (Hanover), but the records you need are very likely not on the internet going back beyond the day they arrived here.

You don't mention the year that they arrived, which is something you'd find on the internet from census records. If they arrived before 1901, immigration records will probably be no help to you. Passenger records were skimpy and didn't give much information on the Prussians and they usually arrived early in the German immigration wave and didn't have to fill out the "long form" that came from the 1905/1906 immigration reforms. So there literally isn't much in US federal records to help you.

I'm making a guess that they were Lutheran, though they could have been Catholic or Evangelicals. If they were Lutheran, the records you want are usually in the church library. If they were Catholic, the records you need are in sacramental registers. If they were Evangelicals, it depends and we'd have to talk more about their form of evangelicalism to figure out what would be there. Once you get the church records, you have to go to the local historical society and do more research about the Germans who settled in your area. The trick is that the vast majority of Prussians who came over were what we'd consider Polish. But not all of Prussia was Polish and Hanover was one of the truly German areas. When the Germans came over it was for one of two reasons. They were either recruited by American lumber companies or mines as very cheap labor in exchange for boat passage for themselves and their whole families...or they were coming over to join their family and friends who were already here. The reason the historical society can help is that the recruiters who went to Europe used to literally pick up a town or small region and relocate them en masse. They would be recruited to come to a specific mine or lumber camp when they were given their tickets. That way they were with their family and friends and were far less likely to get homesick and want to return to Europe. That made them "cost effective labor". From a genealogy standpoint it means that if you can find where others in the town originated, you have a lot easier time figuring out where your ancestors originated. That's not information that easily makes its way to the internet, but a few good books from the library or historical society can usually get you back on track. In fact, it's not uncommon if they were here by 1885 to find them in a series of books published ca 1889 called "Biographical Sketches of Prominent Citizens of {fill in the name of their town or county} A publisher out of Chicago sent budding writers out to towns along every rail route in the Midwest to sell the right to be recognized to local farmers, shop keepers and pretty much anyone who lived in a house.

If you want to email more details to me about them, I can try running them through some databases that I have access to for you. No guarantees, but if the records exist online even in Germany, I can usually find them.

Answer 3

well, the very mention of Hanover as part of Prussia could  get you a clue on likley dates. Hannover was independent until 1868, then joined Prussia and only 3 years later Germany was unified. So if they were born in Hannover, Prussia, they must have been born between 1868 and 1871. Hope this helps.

Hannover is/was  a city as well as a kingdom. If they were born in the city itself, that should help narrow your search in church archives.

You didn't give a name so I can't look after specifics.

here is a list with links of relevant archives / sources for Hanover.

http://www.familysearch.org/Eng/Library/...

Answer 4

You spelled it wrong.  You need to type in Pussian instead of Prussian and search again.  You're welcome.