To Paul Rands In a recent posting you made reference to the "Southwest Germany Emigration Index". Please share with us information about the availability and access to this seemingly helpful database. Thanks. Tom O'Brien Oregon City, Oregon

My suggestions on using the Southwest Germany Emigration Index URL for English language home page = http://www.auswanderer-bw.de/auswanderer/index.php?sprache=en SPECIFIC: Select "Advanced" GENERAL: Fill in as little data as possible to get the most results you can deal with. This may be counterintuitive for those who have not worked with databases. More criteria (data entered) in the search form gives you fewer results and more chance that you'll miss information actually contained in the database. For example, if you specify year of emigration, your ancestor who is in the database without a year of emigration will not appear. I prefer to leave out the year of emigration, then sort (see below) by year of emigration, then inspect all entries in the years I expect plus the beginning of the list (those without a year) and the end of the list (those with data entry errors). If you specify country of destination, you'll miss those without a country of destination or those who said they were going to Russia but went to North America instead. Leave out the first names whenever possible because your ancestor may have used his called name, his christening name, both, both but reversed, some variation of the previous but with a different spelling etc. For example John George Schaeffer might have his first name in the database listed as, Georg, Jorg, Joerg, Jurg, Johann, Hans, Hanss, Johann Georg, Johann Jorg, Hans Georg, Georg Johann (and dozens of other combinations). If you have a rare last name, use it without any thing else. If your last name has variations, put in the letters common to all and then use the wild card %. For example, if you are looking for the surname Bartholome, try Bart% which should yield Barthlome, Barthlomae, Bartholome, Bartholomae, Bartolomeus and dozens of other variations. You may have to use the wild card character % in several variations (in separate searches) to glean all the options. If you have a common last name (Schmidt, for example) you may not be able to wade through all the results so you may need to include more data to narrow down the results. SPECIFIC: At the bottom of the search criteria, select the most appropriate "Sort by" for the type of search you are doing. I usually sort by Emigration year but each time requires you to evaluate and sort appropriately. For example, if you have a last name variations that have a common ending, use the wild card character % to begin the surname and then sort by Last name. For example, you have an ancestor named Vogler but know that German v sounds like German f, and that some umlauted the o, you might try %gler then sort by Last name. Then in the results you'll look under both f and v. Set Hits per page at 100 or 200. This makes your perusal faster/easier. Hits means results. 500 may be too large and cause the search engine to time out. GENERAL: If you have a location, use it as a criteria instead of a last name. Try everything. Assume the data you are looking for is in there wrong or in some way you could never predict and pound the search to death. Then try a few more ideas. DON"T EVER GIVE UP AFTER JUST A FEW TRIES. You'll be surprised what you can tease out of this database. In my next post, I'll reference some interesting searches from this list's archives that I've documented in the past. I often have better luck using the English version than the German version. I wonder if the German page goes down for maintenance sometimes when the English version is up and running for those of us in the North American time zones. The Southwest Germany Emigration database does not contain the names of all those who emigrated but is a great place to start a search. If you have a rare surname, you might not find your ancestor, but you may find places where emigrants with that surname originated. Now, do the same search on his/her spouse's surname and then see if any of those places are near the places the first spouse's surname originated from. Hope this helps. Paul near Portland