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My answer consists of three parts. I start with World War II because more (individual) records are available and I assume people are more interested in it. The second part focusses on World War I and possible research difficulties. The last part covers projects and institutions providing e.g. information on burial sites and memorials of both wars.
World War ...
17
The name is Agnes.
You can compare each of the letters to those shown in this BYU Script Tutorial for German handwriting.
I extracted the relevant letters from the alphabet image on that site, and put them together in one image. I've included your image below for easy comparison.
15
This seems to say "Auscha," which is indeed the German name of a town known in Czech as Úštěk.
11
Based on the following the photo is by H. Richers who operated from at least 1878 to 1913 in Hannover (the link has his street address).
Looking at the ears, chin, eye sockets, nose and mouth features I would say it is the same person and both photos look like they may have even been taken the same day in a single sitting with slight change of styling of ...
10
Folk costumes - Volkstrachten - are traditional clothing that can be highly specific to a region or even a village. The woman in your photo is wearing parts of the Oesterten-Tracht or Lindhorster_Tracht, which was characteristic of eastern Schaumburg-Lippe.
It consists of a characteristic red skirt with colored ribbon trim ("Want"), apron, sleeveless vest ...
10
Ashkenazi Surnames really only came about in the early 1800s actually. The Jews of Western Europe (Germany, France, and England etc) took surnames sooner than their coreligionists in Eastern Europe. In fact, the Jews of Eastern Europe were only required to choose family names because of an edict from the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II after he had allowed Jews ...
9
If you are on Facebook, there is a closed and private group called 'South African Genealogy' that has lots of helpful and active members who know their way around the South African information sites.
Join up, make a post with as much info as you have, and you should get dozens of responses within a few hours to day or so....or you can research yourself.
...
9
The occupation is
Möbelpolierer
[furniture polisher]
Probably different tasks depending on the employer: at a residence, a furniture store or a factory
8
Update: new information on birth place
Let’s sum up what we know for sure:
You had a great-grandfather with the surname Rebholz
What we assume:
He was born in Sigmaringen
What is unknown:
his first name(s)
his birth date
his place and date of death
You are lucky, the birth and other records from the Standesamt Sigmaringen are available online from ...
8
This answer provides some historical context, but does not completely answer the question.
Baden & Württemberg experienced large emigrations in the 1820s to 1850s, to Hungary (recruited by Austria-Hungary to re-settle lands recovered from the Ottomans, in the Banat and Transylvania) and to North and South America. The aftermath of the Napoleonic wars ...
8
I would contact Volksbund, an organization that takes care of German war graves, and Deutsche Dienststelle (WASt), a federal organization maintaining records on servicemen, and ask if it helps to return these tags to them (especially WASt) and provide as much details on the provenance of these tags as possible. They might answer requests based on these ...
8
If they were catholic or protestant
Statistically (based location, given names and surname), as ethnic Poles and living in rural Upper Silesia, your great-great-grandparents were Catholic. (Catholics used a much broader range of given names than the Lutherans). This assumption would be confirmed or refuted in the microfilmed church records.
Dates and ...
8
I wanted to address a point that originally came up in the comments to bgwiehle's answer.
Places are known by different names throughout their history. If a place was called by a particular name during the time the Nazis were in power, it may not be acceptable to use that name in a social setting, for obvious reasons. However, as historians and researchers ...
8
Casualties in the Verlustlisten include the following keys and abbreviations:
t or † (“tot”) – dead
gefallen – killed in action
† an seinen schweren Wunden – died because of his serious injuries
v. or verw. (“verwundet”) – wounded
l.v. (“leicht verwundet”) – slightly wounded
s.v. or schw. verw. (“schwer verwundet”) – seriously wounded
l.v.b.d.Tr. (“leicht ...
7
The Deutsche Dienststelle (WASt) holds
Approximately 1.500.000 files (residue) on foreign P.o.Ws. in German custody. (Assets of the Deutsche Dienststelle)
I wrote a little bit on using records from the Deutsche Dienststelle in my answer to How to find information on German soldiers from World War I and World War II?. In a nutshell: You’ll send a ...
7
The German Red Cross also maintains a WWII tracing service that works independantly from the ICRC services. They have their own records (I confirmed this via email), which indicates that they may even in some cases have information that the ICRC doesn't.
7
This means that he was retained (“zurückgeh.” = “zurückgehalten”) by a neutral country until now (“bish.” = “bisher”), as this list of abbreviations for the navy lists suggests. Now he is prisoner of war (“krgef.” = “kriegsgefangen”). “A” could indicate that this information was received from a foreign country (“Ausland“), as “A.N.” is elsewhere used for “...
7
I understand it as follows: He arrived in Buchenwald 26 January 1945 ("26.1.45 eingel.") and was send to Sachsenhausen on 6 February 1945. This is however not verifiable just from the card. The transport might not have happened.
You could send an inquiry to the memorial site of the former Buchenwald Concentration Camp for additional information. You could ...
7
I am no export on Hesse, but I did a little research:
Your LAGIS results are civil registration which started in 1874.
Church records for several parishes in today’s city of Kassel were destroyed during World War II, according to a text from 1954 at the local history site Erinnerungen im Netz, Erlebtes aus dem Osten Kassels. They name: Waldau, Nieder-und ...
7
I am not an expert, but am adding my humble bits to the answer:
There is no such thing as a jewish surname, indeed.
First of all a surname itself is not a jewish thing. Jews are not indetified by their surname in anything religious. Jews were always identified as "Isaac son of Abraham" and the likes.
Being summoned to read a portion of the Torah in the ...
7
original, probably an exact transcript of the church register entry
"verm. 2. post trin. 1649"
with abbreviations expanded, German and Latin
"vermahlt 2. [Sonntag] post Trinitatis 1649"
English
"married on the 2nd Sunday after Trinity Sunday 1649"
Moveable Feast Day Calendar for: Germany states that although Catholic states had converted earlier (...
7
I can confirm that the text on both cards is indeed in German. Your first card is dated to 1920, the second one seems to have been stamped by the post office in 1917. As far as I know Sütterlin was only developed in 1911 and taught in schools from 1915 on, so the people writing these cards would have learned another form of Kurrent rather than specifically ...
7
This article describes the incident:
http://aircrewremembered.com/roy-arnold.html
and leads me to search for "Oblt Walter Schneider" which comes up with another website or two.
https://airpages.ru/eng/lw/fw190a1_1.shtml
(Fw 190A-1, Werk Nr 027, "Yellow 1" of JG 26, of Oblt Walter Schneider in November 1941, which showed nineteen victory ...
6
Yesterday, online records related to the Kindertransport children became available through FindMyPast:
This is a fascinating collection of digitised government documents
relating to the Kindertransport operation, dating from 1939 to 1945,
held by The National Archives. The records may reveal when and where
your ancestor arrived in Britain. This is ...
6
The International Red Cross holds a lot of information about POW's from WW2. They are currently digitising all their records. At the moment you have to make a written application for them to conduct a search and as a result the response from them can take some time. I did some research on my Father-in-law with them. It took about 3 months from when I applied ...
6
Update: Since the original question and the early answers were written, John has found out that his great-grandfather was not born in Kreuzlingen, but Sigmaringen, now in Baden-Wurttemberg in Germany. I'll leave my answer as a case study for how to find the birthplace when it is not known, since it also addresses the family story about the Swiss citizenship ...
6
Surname derivation from the Angle tribe, once based in northern Germany, is unlikely.
The highest concentration of Angloher residents of Germany per Geogen is in south-east Bavaria, near the Austrian border. An origin in local vocabulary is most likely.
The word ending "er" implies belonging to or having connections to something or somewhere. As it happens, ...
6
Unless a specific line needs to addressed further, the transcript is as complete as possible at this time. (Image unavoidable, tables not possible here). "?" where unsure. s/o = struck out
Notes:
conf. = confirmiert, confirmed; dates are mostly Sundays after Easter, named for the traditional text [1. Quasimodogeniti, 2. Misericordia, 3. Jubilate, 4. ...
6
Technique
Generally when you cannot find information on very small or insignificant placenames, you research nearby larger places (because events may apply to a larger area) or the next placename in the hierarchy. You may even get lucky and find passing references to your main interest that weren't directly searchable.
Scope
Angloh (var. Angerloh) is ...
6
I also found it useful to have this PDF around for comparing the letters. The benefit being you can zoom it in quite a bit:
https://feefhs.org/sites/default/files/guide/german-gothic.pdf
Once you get an initial idea about what the letters are likely to be you can use the following tool to generate a sample which you can check against:
http://altdeutsche-...
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