In municipalities the Stadtverwaltung is for cities and the Gemeindeverwaltung for smaller towns. You can discover which is which at....... http://members.cox.net/hessen/telephones.htm The office that handles citizen's records is the Standesamt. Many towns in Germany switched from church to civil records after Napoleon turned the German system upside down. Others didn't switch until 1874-76. During the 1990s-early 2000's German genealogy anslaught, lots of local church archives were overwhelmed. Old records since then have, in many cases, been placed in central archives for a particular area or region. The Germans have developed quite a database since the early years of German genealogy and it gets better every day. Their awesome database is found at........ http://www.genealogienetz.de/ Here is a link that might be helpful BEFORE church archives: http://www.kinquest.com/degenealogy/researching.php :-) Don