Thanks for your helpful comments. Tom ----- Original Message ----- From: <Spaghettitree@aol.com> To: <prussia-roots@rootsweb.com> Sent: Monday, February 26, 2007 2:31 PM Subject: Re: [PRUSSIA-ROOTS] Wilmink Family Hello Tom - I think it will help you to back up just a bit and concentrate on U.S. records, look at originals wherever you can, since transcriptions always carry errors to some degree. And get your hands on a good map - Hannover (the Duchy and the City) are in the northwest, Lower Saxony or Niedersachsen of present-day Germany, but Bavaria is in the southeast. Königsberg (or Koenigsberg) you have correctly found in East Prussia (remember to use the umlaut or add the e, otherwise it's misspelled) though little exists there now (and there is more than one Königsberg) - the archives in Berlin will be a place to look for those. And sadly, nothing is left of the beautiful city of Königsberg - everything, including the streets themselves, was destroyed. But the answers to finding villages must be tackled in the USA - every scrap of paper or photo you can find - churches, naturalizations, fraternal organizations, newspapers, cemeteries and tombstones, obits, voter registrations, tax records, probates, city directories, applications for marriage licenses and many more - and if you've been searching only on line, try the public and genealogical libraries - there are some good libraries with Germanic collections. Each village, kreis, state in Germany and elsewhere has its own data and method of recording it (or lack of it!) and there is no huge central archive for all of Germany, even though more and more is going on line each day. Also check everything in familysearch.com and Cyndislist.com if you haven't already. Get on the RootsWeb message boards for Bavaria and Lower Saxony and Military. Ancestry.com is now huge. Try looking under V - since Wilmink would be pronounced Vilmink there. You already have multiple spellings and that's a good sign - collect them all, since they do change over time and place and language. There were no spelling rules until about 125 years ago and many, many people could neither read nor write anyway. Keep looking! Maureen ************************************** AOL now offers free email to everyone. Find out more about what's free from AOL at http://www.aol.com. ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to PRUSSIA-ROOTS-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message