German Cities Street Guides

Street Guides are important resources for identifying which church or civil records to search in a large city. Street guides have been created for the following cities (guides for Berlin & Breslau also will be included here but are not quite ready yet):

These guides are designed to help you locate your ancestors' parish and civil registration district in various cities of Germany (or former Prussian states). Each street in the city is listed along with the parish and civil registration district to which a street belonged.

Use these guides to determine the parish or civil registration district for the street where your ancestor lived. Although the jurisdictions given pertain come from a year in the early 1900s, they generally also apply for earlier years as well.

You can identify the address where your ancestor lived in a city from the following documents:

When you find the street name, look up that street in this register to determine which parish your ancestor attended and in what civil registration district they lived. If the street extended into more than one jurisdiction you will need to know the house number. In such cases the street name in the register is followed by house numbers.

The Family History Library has microfilmed the records of many of the parishes of in these cities, although mostly from before 1875. These are listed in the Family History Library Catalog under the name of the city and the topic Church Records. For more recent records, it is necessary to write to the church or the civil registration office in the city.

For help in writing a letter to Germany, please consult the Family History Library Publication German Letter Writing Guide.

Genealogical gazetteers are also available on this site for several former German provinces.