How wonderful that you have a village name! Your next stop is to FamilySearch.org, to find out what has been filmed for your village. See http://genweblog.blogspot.com/2006/03/make-family-history-library-catalog.html for a tutorial, step by step, on how to find the films you need. If you don't know where your closest FHC is, click the link at the end for the list of locations. All the best, Valorie On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 10:47 AM, Marilyn Potthast <omaandopa06@att.net> wrote: > My question to you is even if you have the town where they came from in > Alsace-Lorraine who do you get that information. I have my gr grandfathers > birth certificate where he was born. How do I go about from there. I also > can't find the ship he came over on which was in the late 1850's. The > Birth Certificate says Cosswiller. So where do I go from there? Anyone can > help me would be appreciated. > > -----Original Message----- > From: alsace-lorraine-bounces@rootsweb.com > [mailto:alsace-lorraine-bounces@rootsweb.com] On Behalf Of Valorie Zimmerman > Sent: Sunday, September 14, 2008 4:12 AM > To: alsace-lorraine@rootsweb.com > Subject: Re: [A-L] Holle > > Hi Mary Ann, and welcome to the wonderful world of A-L research. For > all European research, you must have a village name, or at least a > small region with a few villages, because that is where all the > records are kept! There are few to no departement, county or > region-wide censuses or other general surveys such as our US Census > records. So, you must do your American or Canadian research, before > trying to "jump the pond" back to Europe. > > Have you found the naturalization applications? Often the first and > second application contain much more detail than the final > certificate. How about obituaries, in particular those published in > small local newspapers, church publications, or German or French > newspapers? Many of the old newspapers are available on microfilm. > > For lots of ideas of how to go about this, see: > http://genweblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/european-research.html > > I hope this is helpful. > > Valorie ::snip:: -- Facebook: http://www.new.facebook.com/profile.php?id=507013560 LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/valoriez MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/valoriez Genealogy Blog: http://genweblog.blogspot.com/ All my pages: http://valorie.zimmerman.googlepages.com