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Family Tree Magazine Podcast
Finding Church Registers with Matricula – An Interview with Katherine Schober
00:17:16
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- [00:00]
A
The air is getting crisp and for many of us, that means a little extra time to dive into our family history. As genealogists, we spend years building out family trees. But what if you could do more than just connect the dots? What if you could bring those names on your tree to life? This is where Newspapers.com comes in. Imagine reading your great great grandparents wedding announcement, finding an article about your ancestors business, or even seeing a photograph of the house where your Grandma grew up. Newspapers.com is an incredible resource for anyone passionate about genealogy. With more than 29,000 historical newspapers, you can search for your family's names, their hometowns, or important dates and discover the small personal details that transform a name on a page into a real person with a real story. And with the Holidays approaching, a Newspapers.com gift subscription is the perfect present for the family historian in your life. It's a gift of discovery, of connection, and of countless untold stories waiting to be found. Just head over to newspapers.com familytreemagazine to learn more and purchase a subscription for someone special. That's newspapers.com familytreemagazine. Your favorite genealogist will thank you. Welcome to Family Tree magazine's Best Websites Podcast. This is the podcast devoted to finding the best websites to help you with your genealogy research. I'm Lisa Louise Cook. Matricula Online is a specialized digital archive that provides free access to millions of church records from Central and Eastern Europe. And that makes it a best website for any genealogist who is researching in those regions. So to help us out getting familiar with the site and getting the most out of it, I have invited Katherine Schober to the podcast. She is a translator and author. She's also the CEO and founder of Germanology Unlocked. Welcome to the podcast, Catherine.
- [02:17]
B
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
- [02:18]
A
Of course, I thought of you first when I knew we were going to be featuring this website because this is really up your alley in everything that you do. Maybe you could start us off with just kind of what kind of church records. What's the scope of this collection?
- [02:31]
B
Of course. So Matricula started out as an Australian based website, so it was originally only Austrian church records in the early years, but they have since really grown and now there's even more church records for Germany than Austria. Germany is of course a much bigger country, so there's almost 9,000 church books on there for Germany, about 3,000 for Austria. And they also include other countries as well, such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, Luxembourg and Italy. So there's fewer for those Countries. Austria and Germany are the main ones. Oh, and they have Poland as well. So if you're doing any research around those areas, it's definitely worth checking out.
- [03:14]
A
Is it solely church records? And which denominations are we talking about?
- [03:19]
B
That's a great question. Yes. So Matricula mostly focuses on Catholic church records. It is solely church records. So you'll get your baptismal, marriage, and death records. And then depending on the parish, you might get some little fun extra records as well. I've translated some records where it says which pew, so which section or which bench in the church that people sat in. You'll get first communion records, confirmation records. Just kind of depends what the church has in their archives. But Matricula is known for being Catholic, and if you have Protestant ancestors, then you would go to a different website, which is Archaeon.
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A
Oh, okay, great. Now, how about time frame? What kind of a time span are you talking about?
- [04:09]
B
Again, depends on the parish. As a general rule, church records began to be kept in the 1500s, around the time of the Protestant Reformation, when they needed to know who was Protestant and who was Catholic. Of course, as historians will know, the Thirty Years War in the 1600s destroyed many of the records. So many genealogists will run into brick walls with church records in the early 1600s, but that's still 400 years worth of history, so definitely worth looking at. And as for how far they go, it just depends on the privacy laws of the country. So between up to 120 years ago, I believe, or just depending what type of record it is and which country we're looking at.
- [04:58]
A
So who's behind the website, and is it pretty comprehensive or are we going to find, again, some missing gaps?
- [05:07]
B
So I actually got to meet the founder of the website at a German genealogy conference a few years ago. He. I didn't know who he was. I never had seen his picture before. And he came up to my booth and I was talking to him like any other customer. And then I said, oh, what do you do? And he said, oh, I'm responsible for the matricula website. I started it, and I lost my ability to talk. I was fangirling like, I just met the biggest celebrity in the world because I use matricula all the time, and he was the nicest man. He works together with the Icarus archive system. It's a collection of archives in Europe, and they are responsible for digitizing all of these church archives in the individual churches. So they sponsor the platform, and then each individual diocese or church archives loads their Church records onto Metricula. Just kind of like they provide the infrastructure. And then the churches choose what to upload.
- [06:07]
A
Then by region or by parish, would we be finding variations on how much might be there for that particular area?
- [06:16]
B
Exactly. So before you can start researching on matricula, you need to know the hometown, the village where your ancestor came from, because that is how the records have been divided. So you need to know my ancestor came from this town in Austria or Germany, then you to Matricula. And there are multiple ways to search. You can either just type in the name of your town. If you press search by town, there's also a list. If you go to the tab, fons, that's just another word for books. And you can see it divided by country. So it will say Germany, Deutschland, Austria. So it is in German. But you can easily do a little dictionary translation to see the names of those countries.
- [07:04]
A
And.
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B
And then it narrows down from there. So if you're looking in Austria, you'd click on. And then you look at your Austrian state, and then it will list all of the towns and parishes in that state and you'd click on that, and then it will give you a list of all of the books available for that parish. So baptismal, marriage, death, and then it will tell you the years available for those books. That makes sense.
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A
Yeah, absolutely. So there's the books. I see the maps in the menu, and I also search for places. Looks like we can not only put in the name, but we can even narrow down by time frame.
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B
Yes. So that is great. I. I do like to tell people not to narrow it down by time frame too much. Of course, if you have a specific book in mind, that does help. But if you just let it do a broader search, I've never seen so many books available that it's going to overwhelm you. Usually it's about anywhere between two and maybe 15. So it's kind of nice to see everything that's available at once, just in case you run into another ancestor you need to be looking for.
- [08:11]
A
Right.
- [08:12]
B
I do also want to give a little word of warning. I always like to do the search for places first because it's easy. You can just kind of type in the name of your town and then it appears. But I have had clients who type in the name of their town and nothing comes up. But then when they look at it under the fonts tab, going by country, state and village, it shows up that way. So I don't know what's going on with the website, why that Search for places doesn't always work. My advice would be try that easy search for places first. But if no town pops up, don't give up. You can look for it the other way as well.
- [08:51]
A
I can imagine the map really comes in handy, particularly if it's easy one to just misspell a place. Or also that it could names have changed over the centuries and that too could create some challenges.
- [09:04]
B
Exactly. Maybe you have a space there where they don't have a space, or any kind of little variation might affect your search. So don't give up. And then another little tidbit for looking at the entire list of all the books available, rather than just narrowing it down. Not all books that are listed are available online. So once you start looking, you'll get a little blue camera next to all the books that are available online. You can then click on that blue camera and it will show you the digitized copy of the book. But every once in a while you'll see a black camera or a gray camera instead. And that means that the book does exist at that church in Germany or Austria, but it has not yet been digitized. So in that case, if you need that information in that book, you can reach out to the parish and say, hello, my name is so and so. I'm looking for this ancestor from this time period. I see that you have the book online. Would you be able to send me the information? Usually if you get lucky, they'll be happy to do so.
- [10:09]
A
That's a great idea. I'm kind of curious. You mentioned that of course, if they had Protestant ancestors, you might go over to Archaeon. But would there be any type of research advantage for somebody with Protestant ancestors to be looking at the same village but looking at Catholic records? I mean, these are people who lived alongside our ancestors.
- [10:30]
B
Definitely. It's always worth looking to see who were the witnesses, if your ancestor might have been a godparent. I mean, usually that would have been the same religion if they were Catholic. But it's worth looking at just to see, looking at addresses. I know my husband is from Austria and his family, his grandparents, still live at the same address as they did in the 1700s or one address over, but the same street. So it's kind of worth looking if you know your ancestors lived on this street from a Protestant parish, maybe going to look at the Catholic book and see, okay, who were your ancestors, neighbors or something fun like that. There are some Protestant books on matricula as well. It is definitely mostly Catholic, but every once in a while you'll see a Protestant book, a Greek Orthodox book, some other denomination as well.
- [11:16]
A
Interesting. So obviously these records are in the native language of that location. And I know you are a professional translator. How do you coach people on how to deal with the language issue?
- [11:31]
B
That can definitely be the most overwhelming thing for people because of course, it's hard enough to find our ancestors. And then once we find the records, it's a little scary to have them be in a different language. And with German, there's an old type of handwriting as well. So these records are in an old script that even modern Germans cannot read. So there are definitely keys online to look at it. I have a lot of resources and classes on my website, but it's one of those things. The more you expose yourself to it, the easier it gets. Your brain does get used to it. And one thing that does frustrate people a little bit about both matricula and archaeon and is that you cannot search by a person's name. So it's not like an ancestry family search myheritage where you can just type in your ancestor's name. You do need to kind of go painstakingly through those church books. But a good tip to know is they are organized usually chronologically. So if you know the date of your ancestor's birth, marriage or death, you should know which part of the book to look in. And some books will include an index. So before you start just paging through every part of the book, look at the very front or look at the very back, and then you will get an alphabetical index and it will tell you which page your ancestor is on. Not every book has that, but definitely worth checking out before you spend hours and hours looking through the books.
- [13:01]
A
That is a great tip and you absolutely anticipated my next question was, are we going to be browsing or whatever. But sometimes that's half the fun. And as you said, you do get comfortable with the columns and the headings and you're seeing a repetition of birth, death, marriage and that type of thing. I guess the final question would be, do we need an account? How do we download things? Can we download things? And is there any cost involved?
- [13:26]
B
Yes. One of the most important questions, Matricula is free, so it's wonderful anybody can use it. When I met the founder of the site, he said that was one of the things that was the most important to him was keeping it free and accessible for genealogists around the world. You don't even need an account, so you can just go onto the Website, you can use it, you can't download. That is one drawback. You're just supposed to look at them on the website itself.
- [13:53]
A
Very interesting. Because I'm looking at the site, it is not covered in ads. So it's interesting that they're able to keep the lights on, if you will.
- [14:02]
B
So far so good. Yeah. He says he has a lot of dedicated people working for him. So I did, I did ask him, I was curious how that works. And he said just people are very excited about it. They're all passionate about family history and want to keep it available, at least for now to us for free.
- [14:19]
A
Well, this is really one of the best websites. I agree. And I'd love to have you tell people a little bit about what you offer as far as assistance at Germinology Unlocked. Because once we get into this, we really want to understand what we're looking at and get the most out of it. How do you help your people do that?
- [14:36]
B
Sure. So we offer translations. So if you find the record and you're like, oh my goodness, this script is crazy. This German language overwhelms me. We do this professionally, so we work with the script, we work with church records every single day, providing German to English translations for people like you. So we type that handwritten script into German so you get that exact German language that is on your church record and then we translate it into English so you know what is being said as well. We also work with letters and diaries and vital records, pretty much anything and everything to help people understand what's being said about their ancestors. And then if you do want to do it yourself, we also have a number of courses that teach you how to do this. So we have a course that teaches you all about how to decipher and read the old German handwriting, which is our signature course and a lot of fun. And then our newest course is a research based course, the Complete Guide to German Genealogy that teaches you what to do, where to start in German genealogy, how to cross the pond, which records to look for and things like that. So I love teaching and these courses have been so much fun to make.
- [15:48]
A
Well, and you have helped me personally do translation. And I gotta say, there, there is something special about the human eye. Looking at this and making sure that it's correct. I just felt so much more comfortable knowing that somebody who really knew that language had taken a look at it. And you helped me tremendously. So thank you.
- [16:07]
B
Yes, you're welcome. I was glad to help.
- [16:09]
A
Thank you so much for giving us our introduction to Matricula Online. We appreciate it.
- [16:14]
B
Thank you for having me.
- [16:19]
A
Thanks so much for joining me for the Family Tree Magazine Best Websites Podcast. You can find a link over to this month's best website@familytrainmagazine.com podcast also, while you're at the website, I would encourage you to sign up for our free email newsletter. It's the perfect way to stay in touch with everything we've got going on at Family Tree Magazine, including our other podcast, the Family Tree Magazine Podcast. I'm Lisa Louise Cook, and you can find me at my website, genealogygems.com where you'll find links to my Genealogy Gems podcast and our YouTube channel. Until next time, have fun climbing your Family Tree.