The reason I started with genealogy was to find out the story of one of my purported ancestors, Francis Geywitz, who came in the 18th century from "the Palatinate" and was allegedly scalped by Indians at the time of the Revolution in upstate New York. So the story goes. Some 50 years later, I have scarcely made any progress on Francis at all, though his descendants are well-documented. As best as I can determine, he might actually have come from what is now eastern Baden-Württemberg, but i cannot find any documentation to prove this.
The Howks came in the middle of the 19th century and settled in Kentucky. I have no idea of where they came from, except "Prussia", which covered a huge part of Germany at that time.
The strangest part of all of this is that I now live in Germany and speak a fair German. I'd like to say that this has helped me greatly in my researches, but it has only shown me that a lot of leads are negative dead ends.
I will say that Germany has an extremely long and complicated political history, which will confound people who are used to stable, established borders and clear hierarchies in the political structure of polities. Others have mentioned that "Germany" only recently developed a political identity as such. Before then, it was a mish-mash of small or medium-sized states which evolved out of the slow decay of the Holy Roman Empire, which included subjects of many languages as well as political sub-units.
Researchers will want to consult parish records of churches, who kept most of the records which would be relevant to genealogy. If you research people before 1870, when you find out what town they came from, I suggest you go to wikipedia, read the history of the town, and decide which political unit it would have belonged to at that time.
My impression is that, for anyone not associated with nobility, our American genealogy is well-advanced as compared with the Germans'. Only recently have "ordinary" Germans developed an interest in this form of scholarship, not having a migration story, such as we have, in which to be interested. But local officials and church personnel are very co-operative when approached regarding genealogical research.
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By the way, not only is Oktoberfest here, but also the German national day, the Day of National Unity, will be here on October 3, celebrating the day when the treaty was signed that re-united East and West Germany (or at least started it, according to numerous dissatisfied Germans on both sides of the now defunct Iron Curtain). ;=)
