SGGEE - Who and What We Are
Thank you for your interest in the Society for German Genealogy in Eastern Europe. We hope that you enjoy the information here and that you will consider membership. Our Society is a registered non-profit organization in the country of Canada but our membership is from around the world.
Please feel free to download our brochure for additional information and to distribute to your friends and relatives.
This web site is devoted to the study of those people with German ancestry (most often of the Lutheran, Baptist, or Moravian Brethren faiths) who lived in present-day Poland and northwestern Ukraine. Special emphasis is placed on those who lived in the pre-WW I province of Volhynia (generally from the city of Kiev on the east to the present-day Polish border on the west) and on the pre-WW I region of central and eastern modern Poland known as Russian Poland or Congress Poland. Note that, between World Wars I & II, Volhynia was split in half between Poland and Russia. These regions today are in Poland and Ukraine. Peripheral studies include the Kiev and Podolia provinces in Ukraine, and the regions of West and East Prussia, Posen, Silesia, and Pomerania as well as Galicia which was under Austrian rule.
To those throughout the world who are now looking for traces of their ancestors, the task of finding records of them in places with strange sounding names is a formidable one. If you have knowledge that your German ancestors lived for even a short time in one of the lands noted above, then this web site, and the Society that supports it, will be of interest to you.
It is the goal of SGGEE to create, in one place, databases of every known genealogical record of our ancestors while they lived in the lands noted above. In order to help you connect what you know about your ancestors to the data in these lands, this site will combine databases compiled from original records from these lands with: maps and village lists; ship passenger lists; member supplied pedigree charts from descendants of these people who are now in all countries in the world; local history books from areas where our study area people moved to; and generally any other data that we find that will help in connecting you to your ancestors.
This website is paid for entirely by the members of SGGEE, which is a non-profit Society operated solely by volunteers. Much of the site is free to all who search for information about Germans in Eastern Europe, especialy in the locations noted above, but a portion of the site, including our own onsite databases, are only available to our members, because it is they who have paid for these databases with their money and work. If you are not yet a member of SGGEE, consider becoming one, sharing your family history data with us, and thus becoming an active part of our efforts to find information on ancestors that are common to us all. The rewards for membership and active participation will likely be significantly more data back to you for your own files, and you may also actually provide a link for someone else to connect their data to you and many others in our Society.
What's in the Members-Only Area?
We invite you to view our incorporation bylaws and Certificate of Continuance in Adobe format as well as our privacy policy.