The Wuerttemberg Emigration Index

Plot

From the front flap of this 240 page boo: "The nineteenth century witnessed the arrival of some 30 million immigrants to America, with Ireland and Germany providing by far the largest group. In the first half of the century alone, Germany - in particular Prussia - accounted for twenty percent of this new population. Of this German migration, close to 1 million made application to emigrate at Wuerttemberg. Naturally, this emigration/immigration process generated records as countries attempted to keep track of who was leaving and where they were going. Most of these records have lain hidden in foreign archives and few have been indexed, as was the case with the Wuerttemberg emigration records. [This book] presents the firsts comprehensive indexing of the microfilm records of this vast and previously inaccessible body of important primary source material. This collection, filmed at Ludwigsburg, contains the names of approximately 60,000 persons who made application to leave Germany from the late eighteenth century to 1900. This first volume, containing 11,500 names, provides the historian and genealogist alike with a valuable access tool to this storehouse of information. The information supplied on each person includes: name, date and place of birth, residence at time of application and application date, and microfilm number. Until publication of this volume, researchers were left with the nearly insurmountable task of finding an ancestor by searching, one by one, all the applications in this collection. Such a task was made all the more difficult because all the entries are handwritten, thus requiring a researcher to be well-versed in reading German script. The compilers of this volume are recognized experts in this field, and their labors are sure to earn the acclaim of the genealogical community."