List, I got this as a forward, and the headers were stripped. I think the information is still useful. Valorie Subject: Resources for Research in Rhineland-Palatinate & Elsewhere (1) Worldwide Germanic Emigration and Research Sources (2) Lineages of Families from Rhineland-Palatinate & Galicia (3) Pre-World War I Political Entities Governing Rhineland-Palatinate (1) In response to A. John Parker's request re transmigration to South America and for the benefit of others seeking information about Germanic emigration to various countries, GERMANIC GENEALOGY: A GUIDE TO WORLDWIDE SOURCES AND MIGRATION PATTERNS covers Germanic migration and genealogy worldwide. For a description of the contents, see my website at: http://home.cwix.com/~brandt@mci2000.com/edward.htm Because the emphasis of this guide is on comprehensiveness, it cannot provide such detailed specifics as requested by Parker, but it provides a good overview, useful addresses and lots of bibliographic references which may provide greater detail on narrower or more specialized topics. (2) This website also lists many lineages, especially from Rhineland-Palatinate, which I have researched. In this case, the emigrants went to Galicia before coming to North America a good century later. But it was not unusual for different individuals in the same extended family to migrate in different directions: Eastern Europe, U.S., Canada, Brazil, Australia, etc. (3) For newcomers who are confused about the origin of their ancestors, with different documents referring to different political entities, GERMANIC GENEALOGY also provides a great deal of information on pre-World War I entities and identifies numerous non-political terms which people often used to describe their area of origin. To deal with Rhineland-Palatinate as concisely and clearly as possible, it was divided among four different pre-unification German principalities, which became sub-units of the German Empire. The historic Palatinate (the southeastern part of the current state) belonged to Bavaria (Bayern). The roughly turnip-shaped area including Mainz, Worms, Alzey and Bingen, now an administrative district still known as Rheinhessen, belonged to Hesse (Hessen). Most of the western and northwestern areas constituted the Prussian Rhine province, cataloged by the Family History Library under "Preussen, Rheinland." Birkenfeld was an oblong enclave along the upper Nahe River valley and belonged to Oldenburg. Of these four previously independent German states, only Hesse was adjacent to the part of Rhineland-Palatinate which it governed. If you have pre-Napoleonic immigrant ancestors, the political jurisdictions were far more numerous, more fragmented and more confusing even for top-notch German scholars. Wilhelm and Kallbrunner, who did extensive research in the Austrian archives to identify those who migrated to the Lower Danube (now known as Danube Swabians, earlier Hungarian Germans) and Galicia (the part of Poland which fell under Austrian rule during the First Partition and remained Austrian after 1815), incorrectly identified many of the places of origin listed in the archival records, partly for this reason, partly because of misspellings, and partly because so many German communities have identical or similar names. By far the largest number of migrants to Galicia came from what is now Rhineland-Palatinate. Most of the pre-1781 migrants to the lower Danubian areas now in Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia (then South Hungary) came from the German-speaking parts of Lorraine, because only Catholics were accepted prior to that date. However, a large number of the migrants -- more than from Swabia -- came from Rhineland-Palatinate, which had a very mixed population in religious terms: Reformed, Lutherans, Catholics and a few Mennonites (who originated mostly in Switzerland and long called themselves Brethren).