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Those who read "Roots & Branches" week in and week out know that I ended last week's report on the FamilySearch Library in Salt Lake City with my chagrin about a particular reference book.
For those who don't read every week, this book had been part of the huge "de-spine-ing" project that happened some years ago when FamilySearch apparently got ahead of its skis and thought it was going to put all its collection online.
And then ran into perceived copyright problems.
This particular book, an inventory of all the Protestant parishes in Bavaria including when each of the parishes' records commence, is now only available in the library on microfilm, and has no easy way to access it in bulk (since I'm interested in working through parishes in an entire region of Bavaria).
For those who are reference book junkies such as myself, it's typically long German-language title is Pfarrbücherverzeichnis für die Evang.-Lutherische und Evang.- Reformierte Kirche des rechtsrheinischen Bayerns, which translates as Register of Parish Records for the Evangelical-Lutheran and Evangelical-Reformed Churches of Bavaria East of the Rhine.
The "east of the Rhine" part of the title is needed because for the entire 19th century, the full political unit of the Kingdom of Bavaria consisted not only of what we call Bavaria today (which indeed is way east of the Rhine River on a map oriented with north at the top) but also the area "left of the Rhine" that is otherwise known historically as the Pfalz (or Palatinate in English).
So, this book is limited to the Protestant parishes in modern-day Bavaria, which while overwhelmingly Roman Catholic today, historically had some areas in which Protestants were in the majority.
And my whole reason for all this was a family named Strauss that originated somewhere in the Ansbach region of northwestern Bavaria. Since I didn't know an exact parish, I was (and still am!) working through any clues I get to the Strauss name, and finding in the process that the time in which I'm working -- mostly the second half of the 160ss -- was a time of movement, even among the peasant classes.
This made access to the whole as a whole vital, with these families jumping from one parish to another (as well as finding out that when a marriage record noted that the father was from "Mosbach" that there were no less than five villages so named in Bavaria from which to search!).
Once I was back home from Salt Lake--and right after I had written last week's column--I did what I'd consider a "hail Mary" and looked on Archion.de, the Germany-based Protestant registers website.
Normally I've looked for only registers there, but this time--cued by a Google search of the title of this church record inventory--I found that this reference work was available right there on Archion! Problem solved!
Beidler is a freelance writer and lecturer on genealogy. Email jamesmbeidler@gmail.com. Like him on Facebook (James M. Beidler).