I spent a significant part of the covid period absolutely hooked on genealogy research.<p>As others have mentioned, (1) <a href="http://familysearch.com" rel="nofollow">http://familysearch.com</a> is excellent, incredibly good for being free, and (2) <a href="http://ancestry.com" rel="nofollow">http://ancestry.com</a> is also extremely useful. Yes the latter is paid and expensive, unfortunately. There is a significant degree of overlap between the two, but both tend to have some resources indexed (or indexed slightly differently) that the other does not. It will be difficult to do a serious search without using both to complement each other.<p>German records are fairly good from about the early 1800’s through the early 1900’s right up to the world wars. The wars mucked with things and for obvious reasons you will find families migrating to escape poverty, war, death, etc.<p>Some random tips:<p>* Remember that borders are not static. Name of places and even countries change over time and this was especially true of Germany during this time period. An invaluable tool to help disambiguate this is the Meyer’s Gazetter <a href="http://meyersgaz.org/" rel="nofollow">http://meyersgaz.org/</a><p>* Trace to at least 3 generations and 3rd cousins of your known connections, and look at the other trees connected to those individuals on ancestry.com. While user created trees are sometimes sloppy and should be taken with several grains of salt, it is often the case that someone else in the wider family already knows or has researched something, and it can be a good place to start pulling at threads before starting from scratch.<p>* Spelling of names can change through the years and across migrations. Learn to think phonetically and assume transcription errors happen frequently, both of the records and in the <i>creation</i> of the records themselves.<p>* Birthdates are just as bad as name transcriptions, finding matching records at +/- 2 years is relatively common, I usually search a person at +/- 5 years when starting out. This is especially true with adoptions, unfortunately.<p>* Because of the previous, family group matches (ages/gender) are at least as important as exact name matches. Ex a family with a vaguely similar family name, but dad, mom, and 7 children of the right age/gender, might be a match.<p>* For most of the older records there may be no census or similar. In this case it can be relatively same to assume groups of children clustered in the same place, with the same parent names, are probably in the same family. (Especially true when the parents marriage and all the baptisms are at the same church)