Hi Madeline, it's very difficult to find out where the informations on your ancestors can be found in the yeras before 1800. You have to know, to what territory belongs this village and where could the documents be found. Some villages belongs to more than one government. You have to know the religion of your ancestors to look up the right church records. The churchbooks of Rheinhessen (with Gau-Odernheim) where collected by the french government an given to the political community. Some of the books came back to the parishes later after the french priod. So you can find them at - the parishes - the deanery archive - the archive of the bishopric - the archive of the community (Verbandsgemeinde) - the archive of the state Some informations of the Rheinhessen Area could be found at Paris/France or Wien/Austria. > I then wrote directly to the kath. church in Gau-Odernheim inquiring > about earlier records, and the priest forwarded my letter to a area > civil administration group in Alzey(I think the name was a > Verbindungsgemeinschaft, or something like that), and they sent me a > wealth of additional information going back four more generations, > female ancestors included. I was dumbstruck. > > So, even if church records may (or may not) have been destroyed by war, > there is a POSSIBILITY that some other records may still exist, and it > worth taking a shot at. Sometimes it is possible to find other records > besides churchbook records, > ... and in many cases duplicate church records exist in other repositories. Duplicates of church records did not exist for the time of the 30-year-war and earlier. The catholic parishes of archbishopric Mainz begins at 1754, for the western banks of the river Rhine you get Zivilstandsregister since 1798, and Hesse-Darmstadt begins at 1808 with duplicates. There might be more informations, but it's thrilling like a crime to find out where. And often you need a unforeseen event ... Ernst-Peter (Winter)