Some friends asked me about this page: "Warum auf englisch?"
- why on english? The answer is simple:
Especially in America
there are many people looking for the origin of their families. And
some of these have German origins. And there may be - out there in
the vast and endless space of the WWW - someone in the world whose
ancestors had been related to my family.
The page is organized in family"lines":
paternal
line: the parents of the fathers
maternall line: the
mothers of the mothers
Paternal lines are "normal" in genealogy: the family name is transferred from generation to generation by the fathers to the sons and so on....
Maternal lines are interesting bacause the information of the mitochondric DNA as a tracer of the homo sapiens' heritage is transferred only by mothers (see Bryan Sykes for details). Unfortunately it is very difficult to trace back the records (mostly churchbooks) because the woman changed their names and often followed their husbands to other places than their bithplaces.
I tried to follow the lines back in history as well on my mothers side (Vahlsing line) and my fathers side (Kaßler line). The information is organized in seperate files but there are hypertext-links between the different files. Additional information in is linked to the remarks. These links will lead you to:
URL of other genealogy researchers,
other files of my URL,
general information pages (e.g. the link to Sykes above),
information pages of villages and towns.
Unfortunately there is a threshold in the North German
records: the great War of 30 Years (1618 to 1648). During this war
many records got lost or had been destroyed. Futhermore 2/3 of the
population of the Heiliges Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation died
of pestilence or got killed by the lansquenets of the different war
parties. This means that not only the official written records got
lost but additionally the traditional passing of family information
by word of mouth faded away too.
So it may be quite useful to
regard the year 1640 (+/- a few years) as the beginning of serious
research; and that time is approximately 10 generations back in time.
The region of Germany where my ancestors lived is the north and middle of Germany and the earliest settlers in historical times have been the germanic tribes who belonged to the League of the Sax - the Saxons. They settled during the 5th century (the great migration of peoples (Völkerwanderung). Of course people lived there before: the Cherusker and Thuringer at times of the Roman Empire and nameless tribes when the ice of the last ice-age - the Weichsel-Glacial - retreated about 15 kYears ago.)
If you want to look up the villages on a map you should search in the folowing regions:
Vahlsing: west of Hannover
Kaßler: west of Leipzig
If the villages are present on the WWW I'll link them to the names of the resp. family members.
P.S.:
I live in the north of Germany in Schleswig
Holstein in the county Kreis
Plön. The town - founded in march 2008 - is close to the capital of Schleswig-Holstein Kiel and is called Schwentinental.
It's only a distance of 6 km by Kajak from where I live on the
Schwentine river
to the Baltic sea.