[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] NOW certificate requests for citizenship

[Paul Rakow]

    Dear Al,

        I found these requests when I visited Berlin in 2006,
  I wrote an article about them for the SGGEE Journal, which is
  in the September 2007 issue, which you can download from the
  SGGEE web site. I won't repeat here everything that was in the
  article, but the short answers are:

        Yes, they are definitely of genealogical interest. They
  almost always give birthplace, birthdate, and residence.  Sometimes
  there can be much more: I found my great-great grandfather's
  application (Ludwig Gruenke). It included a letter several pages
  long, telling his life story up to the age of 50, with lots of
  places and dates. That's one of the most exciting documents I've
  ever found.

       After I got back from Berlin I found that these applications
  are on LDS microfilm, they have 60 reels, covering dates from
  1839 to 1919 (see the article for numbers). I've only looked at
  films from the early 1870s, which were mostly from Volhynia.

       I started making an index to a few films, I have about 300 names
  in a spreadsheet, but I haven't added much new in the past year. If
  there is someone with a lot of time and patience, and convenient
  access to a Family History Centre, this could be a useful project.

                       Paul Rakow
                        rakow at ifh.de

  albertmuth at aol.com wrote:

> Paul,
>
> Can you describe the nature of these "certificate requests"?
> What kind of information was there? that is, did they
> offer any information of genealogical interest, such as date
> of birth and/or birthplace?
>
> Is this a resource that some nice, young-at-heart, enterprising
> genealogist should mine for information?  And, if so, do you
> know if they are only available in Berlin at the Secret State
> Archives, or have these records been microfilmed?
>
> We all know how difficult that it is to find the origin of many of
> these colonists.
>
> Al Muth
>