> If someone is said to come from Niedersachsen, what would be some of the main > cities to search. > Thanks > Depending on the time period, most people who emigrated from Germany came from rural areas, not cities. (This was true for all seven of my immigrant ancestors, including four who came from what is today Niedersachsen.) I think this would especially be true if the person settled in a rural area or a small town in the U.S. (This wasn't the case for my family -- all seven settled in New York City, including one who farmed in Brooklyn and Queens, New York until about 1930.) So, unless you know that your ancestor came from a city in Niedersachsen, your best bet is that he came from a rural area. Most of Niedersachsen in the past and even today is rural (it was the most sparsely populated of the states that made up West Germany). It was made up of thousands of small farm villages, ten to twenty of which were grouped into a parish. There were Lutheran parishes (this was the dominant religion), Reformed parishes and Roman Catholic parishes. The following website gives a partial list of the Lutheran parishes in Niedersachsen: http://www.hist.de/KB-hannover.htm There are 910 Lutheran parishes on this list. The records for each one were kept separately, thus there is no central index of information for Niedersachsen or any of it's component parts (Hannover, Oldenburg, and Braunschweig). There is an effort underway to index one of the Hanover censuses from the mid-1800's, but this will take many years (They have been working on it for a couple of years and I think they have finished less than 5%). Unfortunately, this means that you need to know the parish where your family lived. (If you know the village, you can determine the parish.) The best place to get this information is in U.S. records (church record - marriages and baptisms of the children, emigration records, citizenship records, death records including obituaries, etc.) Once in a while, you might get lucky and match a person's birth date up with a person who who was researched by someone else, but this is rare. (I have been able to do this for two people (out of 55,000) in my database.) I wish you luck. Fred Buck Cincinnati, Ohio