Note: This post provides the answer posed to readers in Post 49 challenged to find the death register listing of my grandfather among the civil registry records of the Landesarchiv Berlin.
Most readers will never have any reason to access the Landesarchiv Berlin civil registry records (i.e., births: 1874-1907; marriages: 1874-1937; deaths: 1874-1987), so I expect few if any of you attempted to locate the name of my grandfather Felix Bruck in Berlin’s Sterberegister, death records, unless you enjoy challenges. That said, this turned out to be more difficult than I intended. Let me review for readers the information I provided in Post 49, then explain why ferreting out my grandfather’s death listing was not as straight-forward as I may have led readers to believe.
Figure 1 is the scan I provided of my grandfather’s death certificate (the archaic German word “Todesschein” is used, but the modern German term is “Totenschein”). The Todesschein includes the following information:
Death Register Nr. 971 of the year 1927
First name and surname: Felix Bruck
Husband of Else née Berliner from Berlin-Wilmersdorf at Düsseldorfer Straße 24
Profession: pensioner, 63 years old, born in Ratibor [today: Racibórz, Poland]
Died on the 23rd of June 1927 in Berlin IX
Recorded Berlin on 22nd of July 1927
The Registrar.
Theoretically, all the information readers needed to locate my grandfather’s death register listing was provided, so no sleight-of-hand was perpetrated. Some readers may have assumed that because my grandfather lived with my grandmother, Else Bruck née Berliner, in Berlin-Wilmersdorf at Düsseldorfer Straße 24, his death would have been registered in the Standesamt, civil register office, that today encompasses the Berlin boroughs of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf; this would be a reasonable assumption, and where I myself started. Unfortunately, I did not find my grandfather listed in the 1927 Sterberegister for the neighborhood of Wilmersdorf.
I remind readers of the situation I discussed in Post 49 of Dr. Ernst Neisser, husband of my first cousin twice removed, who attempted to commit suicide on October 1, 1942 with his first cousin, Luise Neisser; while Luise was successful and died that day, Ernst lingered in a coma until October 4th. Luise’s death was registered in the Standesamt -Charlottenburg where she and Ernst shared an apartment, but since Ernst was taken to the Jüdische Krankenhaus Berlin, Berlin Jewish Hospital, and succumbed there, his death was recorded in the neighborhood of Wedding in the Berlin borough of Mitte where the hospital is located, in an altogether different civil register office, in Standesamt-Wedding.
I began to suspect a similar circumstance may have arisen with my grandfather Felix Bruck, that he died in a different Berlin borough than he lived; thus, I re-examined his Todesschein, death certificate, which I fortunately have a copy of. The stamp on the certificate, which I’ve circled, reads “Berlin IX.” (Figure 2) If readers noticed this, like me, they may have shrugged it off as being irrelevant since it does not correspond with the name of any Berlin borough, either past or present. However, in fact, this is the key to solving “the challenge.” By typing in “Berlin” in the search box Standesamt on the Landesarchiv Berlin portal page, a pull-down menu listing 13 Berlin neighborhoods, plus additional subdivisions within some, appears. Here you select “Berlin IX” and Sterberegister, press “Suchen (i.e., Search),” and the death register for year 1927 is among those listed. Scroll down to the surnames beginning with the letter “B,” and here’s where you’ll find my grandfather’s name recorded under the month of June. (Figures 3a-b)
I can hear readers asking themselves two questions, “how would I have known to check for the ‘borough’ Berlin when no such named borough existed?” and “what records do the listed Berlin civil registration offices ‘I-XIII’ contain?” These, at least, are the two questions I asked myself. Not knowing the answers to them, I turned to one of my German cousins, and his explanation allowed me to understand the significance of these records and make connections between historical events I’d previously failed to see as related.
To understand the meaning of “Berlin IX” found on my grandfather’s death certificate, it is necessary to briefly review the history of Prussia and Berlin between 1874 and 1920. The German Empire was established in 1871, and Prussia was by far the largest and most influential state in the new German Empire; Berlin was the capital of Prussia, and henceforth became the capital of the German Empire. As previously discussed, in 1920, the “Greater Berlin Act” incorporated dozens of suburban cities, villages and estates around Berlin into an expanded city; the act increased the area of Berlin from 66 to 883 km2 (25 to 341 sq. mi). Between 1874 and 1920, the old city of Berlin was composed of 13 districts (Figure 4), each of which had a Standesamt, civil register office, including Berlin IX. The old Berlin corresponds roughly to the current borough of “Mitte.” (Figure 5) The civil register offices for these original, older Berlin districts recorded vital events until 1937-38, whereupon they were recorded by Standesamt offices in the then newly constituted boroughs of Mitte, Tiergarten, and Wedding, until the latest reorganization of the Berlin boroughs in 2001 that established the present, expanded borough of Mitte.
“Berlin IX” meant the so-called “Spandauer Vorstadt” (Figure 6), a suburb of Berlin with the name Spandau, or “Spandau Revier” (“revier” means territory) as is written on my grandfather’s death certificate. Spandauer Vorstadt (“vorstadt” means suburb) should not be confused with the outlying Berlin borough of Spandau, of which it was never a part.
The year 1874 was important in the history of Prussia. As discussed in the original Post 49, this year saw the establishment of the Standesämter, civil registration offices, for recording births, marriages, and deaths. These registry offices were the result of the Kulturkampf, the conflict between the German imperial government and the Roman Catholic Church from about 1871 to 1887, predominantly over the control of educational and ecclesiastical appointments. The German imperial government had the dream of breaking the influence of the Roman Catholic Church in the school system and in everyday life of individuals, and thereby compelled that births, marriages and deaths be registered as civil rather than religious “events.” With the establishment of the civil registration offices, the churches and other religious entities lost these functions.
I don’t expect readers to recall this but I discussed the Kulturkampf in a much earlier post (Post 12) in the context of explaining how I was finally able to locate the birth certificates for my father, born in 1907 in Ratibor, Germany [today: Racibórz, Poland] and his sister, born there in 1904, only when I examined the civil records at the “Archiwum Państwowe W Katowicach Oddzial W Raciborzu (State Archives in Katowice Branch in Racibórz),” where these are archived. The important thing for interested readers to understand is that after about 1874, one must turn to civil registration offices to find vital records for one’s ancestors who resided in the German Empire.
For readers who have a need to search the Berlin civil register records, you will find it challenging, time-consuming, and frustrating. Still, it can be rewarding. In recent months, I’ve discovered 12 historic certificates involving 14 individuals related or connected to my family. In five other instances where I have credible knowledge a vital event took place in Berlin, I’ve been unable to find any record of the event. For births, I would expect them to have occurred in the city, village or estate where the parents resided, but with marriages and deaths, they could easily have taken place in a different town or borough than where the people resided, making them much more difficult to track down.
Since publishing Post 49, I was contacted by a woman from Mexico City whose Jewish father fled Germany in the 1930’s and had his citizenship revoked by the Nazis; the father is trying to re-establish his German citizenship and needs to track down vital documents for himself and his deceased parents to bolster his claim. Despite having very precise knowledge where in Berlin-Wilmersdorf her father and grandparents lived and when the grandparents got married, I’ve been unable to help this lady find relevant historic documents. Because of privacy laws, birth certificates after 1907 are only available to immediate family, so the family will need to contact the civil register office for Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf to obtain this document for the father born in 1931; since I was unable to locate the grandparents’ 1930 marriage register listing, the family will also be compelled to request a search for this document by this office.