Mrs. Slug and I are going to be in Berlin next month and thought that we could take a quick day to visit my grandfather’s birthplace in Nordhausen. My dad wants me to try and get to the city hall to try and pull birth certificates for his dad and uncles and hopefully for his grandparents.
If the materials are there (and who knows how well this city kept its records) how accessible would this be for a schmoe like me to walk in and ask for help in obtaining them? Are the local personnel in the records offices pretty much sick of Americans coming in and asking for stuff or are they be reasonably helpful? Do you think it would take a great deal of time to get through the records or have they been reasonably well indexed? Clearly I will be handicapped by a lack of good German, but I am hoping that I can manage.
I had someone living there do research for me, and he didn’t seem to have much problem accessing records, even in the eastern part of the country. It’s a real drawback if you can’t read old German, though.
Not having done any genealogical research myself (and IANAL), but after googling around for the relevant law:
the birth records should be at the municipiality for births in 1876 and later (before then they would usually be in the church books). Whether they have them for pre-1945 would probably depend on whether town hall was hit in WW2 (the German Wikipedia article says most of the town was destroyed in April 1945).
due to privacy concerns the relevant statute says copies of birth certificates are only issued to the person itself, to spouses, ancestors and descendants - not to other relatives e.g. siblings, except when they can demonstrate a legal necessity. So you’d be able to get your grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s birth certificate (perhaps you’d need your father’s birth certificate and your own to prove that you are in fact his descendant), but not e.g. your father’s uncle’s certificate because you are not his descendant. If you know someone who is your father’s uncle’s descendant you could try with a power of attorney from that person. In any case you need ID for yourself.
the municipial office responsible for vital records is called the Standesamt.
Having done a tiny bit of genealogical research I can confirm all that.
You will have to pay a small fee (I think EUR 6-8) per certificate if you give them proper details. If the clerks have to do actual research you will have to pay for their time (some two-digit amount per hour.) In your case you should have the name of the person and the exact date (and of course you have the location already.) As long as the earlier ancestors lived in the same town it should be possible to go backwards from the records of the most recent person and that alone shouldn’t count as the expensive kind of research.
You should definitely have some proof of the connection to your grandfather. This isn’t enforced rigorously. Sometimes they won’t bother to check but you have to be prepared for a clerk who wants to follow the letter of the law.
That could prove to be an interesting problem. I can prove my father’s connection via his birth ceritificate, but my connection to my father. My Consular Report of Birth Abroad does not list my parents.
I’d just like to add that the Standesamt system was introduced in all of Germany in 1876, as has been noted before. If you want to do research regarding the time before that, you should contact church authorities. Before the introduction of the state-regulated civil registration system, most church parishes kept local records of baptisms (which usually came soon after birth), marriages, and deaths.
Of course you need to know the denomination of your ancestors, but there are only two realistic possibilities - Roman Catholic or Lutheran. In the case of Berlin, Lutheran is much more likely.