Join us starting at 10:30 for hospitality and mingling. The business meeting starts at 11:00, followed by our featured speaker around 11:30.

Our presentation is “Finding German Ancestors: Their Information is Not All on the Internet” by Bernard N. Meisner, Ph.D.

Download The Handout

To locate records about your family in Germany it is essential to determine their home town through an exhaustive search of U.S. records, since most German records are maintained at the local level (town or parish). Also, due to wars and boundary changes your family’s records may now be located in another state or country. In this presentation I will review how to identify the home town, demonstrate the use of finding aids to identify where civil and church records might be located, and provide links to online resources for correspondence and reading/interpreting German printing and handwriting.

Bernard Meisner, Ph.D. is a genealogist and lecturer based in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. He began researching his family over 25 years ago and enjoys sharing lessons learned from those experiences, including his mistakes. Although he knew only one grandparent (his maternal grandfather) he has successfully identified all of his great-great grandparents and several triple- and quadruple-great grandparents. He is the president and social media chair of the Mid-Cities Genealogical Society, and is a member of the National Genealogical Society and the Texas State Genealogical Society.

Bernard recently retired from the National Weather Service Southern Region Headquarters where he was the Acting Chief of the Science & Technology Services Division. He is certified as a consulting meteorologist by the American Meteorological Society and holds a teaching certificate from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. He has taught at the Universities of Texas, Oklahoma and St. Thomas (Houston). Bernard earned a B.S. in physics/German from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in meteorology from the University of Hawaii.