Germany Project Category Guidelines

Surnames/tags: Germany Categorization

This page is a part of the Germany Project
WikiTree Guidance on Categories
Feel free to join the Germany Categorization Team!

This page is understood as a collection of best practices, rather than actual rules ... feel free to discuss and edit it!

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Sven, Alexandra and Flo talking about Names, Location and Categories for German Profiles on WikiTree Day 2023

Contents 1 High Level Categories 2 Location Categories 3 Migration Categories 3.1 Migration Category Structure 3.2 Additional Sub-Project Categories 3.3 Immigrant Ship Categories 3.4 Supporting Browser Extensions 4 Cemetery Categories 5 Early Deaths 6 World War I 7 Categories in German 8 Maintenance Categories 9 Help

High Level Categories

NOTE: The categories below are "high level categories" and should serve as a starting point to categorizing. Please do NOT add individual profiles to these categories. Instead add profiles to the narrowest category possible, starting with the subcategories named in each high-level category.

• Category: Germany
• Category: German Nobility (please categorize to proper house)

Location Categories

As opposed to location fields for birth, marriage and death, which are supposed to be used in their historic form at the time of the event, German location field categories for places resemble the present structure of Germany. Like this, both aspects are combined in a profile.

For detailed information on how to name and categorize location categories, please refer to the guide on Structure and how to use regional categories for Germany.

Please only use present day categories instead of using subcategories of Category: German History/Category: Former German Territories. Since the structure of what is now Germany changed quite frequently, it is impossible to also have different historical categories for villages and cities per time frame. As opposed to the migration categories, the location categories are supposed to be named in German.

Historical German territory categories should also not be used to categorize nobility carrying the name of their territory (e.g. members of the family Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen are supposed to be categorized below Category:House of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen rather than below a Category:Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen).

This only applies to locations that belong to today's Germany. Locations that used to belong to Germany, but are now situated in other European countries, can be categorized by their former German name and historical location (e.g. Category: Königsberg, Königsberg, Ostpreußen). These categories can be linked to their present-day equivalent in the current country using Template:Aka, like explained on the page about the Categorization structure for Prussia (in present-day Poland only), which will synchronize the profiles in both categories. Banat Location Categories use the same mechanism.

A way of creating present-day location categories without too much typing effort is using either WikiTree BEE (demo) or a bookmarklet to generate the category code from Wikipedia. The TNG version of the bookmarklet also tries to guess counties and states.

Migration Categories

Migration Category Structure

Germany-related migration categories in general follow the Migration Category Structure. But as opposed to the location categories, the categories for migration from location A to location B are in English and use historic names. That's what the subcategories of Category: German History are for.

Generally migration categories should include the kind of territory, they refer to, e.g. county ("Grafschaft"), duchy ("Herzogtum"), electorate ("Kurfürstentum"), free imperial city ("Freie Reichsstadt"), kingdom ("Königreich"), landgraviate ("Landgrafschaft"), lordship ("Herrschaft", margraviate ("Markgrafschaft"), prince-bishopric ("Fürstbistum", "Hochstift") or principality ("Fürstentum"). Only for historical/legacy reasons are currently a few exceptions to this rule, e.g. the categories for Prussia, Württemberg and Lippe.

The migration categories simplify German territorial history a bit, in order to maintain less categories (and more sanity). The top level categories for people emigrating from what is now Germany to another country:

• Category: Holy Roman Empire, Emigrants (emigration until 1806)
• Category: German Confederation, Emigrants (emigration between 1806 and 1870)
• Category: German Empire, Emigrants (emigration between 1871 and World War II)
• Category: Germany, Emigrants (only for emigration after World War II and today)

Same goes for people immigrating to what is now Germany:

• Category: Holy Roman Empire, Immigrants (immigration until 1806)
• Category: German Confederation, Immigrants (immigration between 1806 and 1870)
• Category: German Empire, Immigrants (immigration between 1871 and World War II)
• Category: Germany, Immigrants (only for immigration after World War II and today)

The migration categories also ignore the change from noble reigns (kingdoms, duchies ...) to republics in the early 20th century. Therefore, for example, the category Category: Grand Duchy of Baden, Emigrants covers both German Confederation and German Empire until 1945, even though it was the Republic of Baden since 1918.

Profiles with migration from and to the German Democratic Republic ("East Germany") between 1949 and 1990 should use the subcategories of Category: German Democratic Republic (East Germany), Emigrants and Category: German Democratic Republic (East Germany), Immigrants.

For an overview over existing migration categories through the middle of the 19th century, check out German Diaspora: Emigration during the mid-19th Century.

Additional Sub-Project Categories

Some sub projects also have migrant categories of their own:

• Germanna Colonies America: German settlement in the Colony of Virginia starting in 1714.
• Prussian Settlement in Australia - German Australians team page. This team was firstly focussed on Prussian migrants to Australia, however it includes many other German speaking immigrants to Australia. The Free Space Page is managed by the Australia Project.
• Markham Berczy Settlers: adding the 64 German families who arrived in Upper Canada (now Ontario) in 1794 with William Berczy and settled in Markham Township.
• German Brazilians: From 1824 to 1969, around 250,000 Germans emigrated to Brazil. The earliest colonists arrived between 1818-1824, forming the colonies in Ilhéus, Bahia, São Jorge and São Leopoldo.

Immigrant Ship Categories

While you are at it, please also assign your immigrants and emigrants to the corresponding ship category (provided they didn't travel over land, of course). In case there is no category for the ship already, please create one. The naming convention is "<Ship name without RMS, SS etc.> (<launch year>)". The launch year usually can be found by checking out the corresponding issue of Lloyd's Register available at the Internet Archive. If you don't find the launch year, feel free to use "(Ship)" instead. Please assign at least Category:Ships by Name to the category. Even if this means having multiple ships of the same name conflated in one category, it might still be the only chance of ever again getting a grip of those profiles, especially with impossible-to-search-for ship names like "Detroit" or "New York".

Some projects also use arrived (example) or sailed (example) categories to separate the voyages of a ship, like the Australia Project. Creating those is optional, but please create at least a ship category.

Supporting Browser Extensions

When creating a new migration category containing "Emigrants from", "Immigrants to" or "Migrants from", the WikiTree Browser Extension will automatically insert a pre-popuplated CategoryInfoBox Migration. If you can't or don't want to use the browser extension, the bookmarklet MigrationCategoryHelper.js basically does the same thing (but supports less countries).

The WikiTree Browser Extension]] will do the same, when creating both ship and voyage categories by populating the edit box with parent categories and a category info box (voyages only).

WikiTree BEE will also let you create a category directly from a Wikipedia article about a ship.

Cemetery Categories

Categories for cemeteries in present-day Germany should be categorized below Category: Germany, Cemeteries in the subcategory of the state. Although the German states below this category are in English (e.g. "Bavaria" instead of "Bayern"), the actual cemetery category names should contain the German state name, since the cemetery category will also be listed below the corresponding location category, which also has it's name in German spelling.

For example, the Category: Waldfriedhof Dachsberg, Kamp-Lintfort, Nordrhein-Westfalen, is categorized below Category: North Rhine-Westphalia, Cemeteries (via the "parent" parameter in Template:CategoryInfoBox Cemetery), as well as below Category: Kamp-Lintfort, Nordrhein-Westfalen (via the "location" parameter). A county or city subcategory of Category: North Rhine-Westphalia, Cemeteries, would still use the English state name.

German soldier cemeteries should carry their German name like it is written at the entrance, usually this is either "Deutscher Soldatenfriedhof ..." or "Kriegsgräberstätte ...". If the site is operated by Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge, the cemetery category should also have Category:Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge as parent.

WikiTree BEE will help you create cemetery categories from the cemetery page at Find a Grave. Sometimes, especially in the case of soldier cemeteries, the name needs to be adjusted with the "[change name]" link in the category preview that is created by BEE.

Early Deaths

The subcategories of these categories should be filled with present-day German state names in English.

• Category:Germany, Stillbirth
• Category:Germany, Infant Mortality
• Category:Germany, Child Mortality

World War I

work in progress

The Category: Germany, World War I, created by The Great War Project, contains subcategories for soldiers fates and military units. If possible, both kinds of categorization should be applied.

The fate subcategories for German soldiers are:

• Category: Died in Military Service, Germany, World War I (unclear reason of death)
• Category: Died of Disease, Germany, World War I
• Category: Died of Wounds, Germany, World War I
• Category: Died while Prisoner of War, Germany, World War I
• Category: Killed in Action, Germany, World War I
• Category: Missing in Action, Germany, World War I
• Category: Prisoners of War, Germany, World War I (German soldiers captured by other nations)
• Category: Wounded in Action, Germany, World War I (wounded, but survived)

The military units are currently separated into four branches:

• Category: Imperial German Army, World War I
• Category: Imperial German Navy, World War I
• Category: Imperial German Army Air Service, World War I
• Category: Imperial German Naval Air Service, World War I

The numbering schemes are, at least for the army, complicated by the fact that with the contracts of transferring their military to the German Empire (see Militärkonvention), the unit numbers of the pre-empire states remained part of the imperial unit name together with the new number following the Prussian scheme. In order to save everyone the headache of getting deeper into this topic, it is recommended, to use the German unit names as they are used in GenWiki, since it looks pretty thought through there.

Please make sure to include the title of the GenWiki page as sorting key, so all infantry regiments are listed below each other. Add padding zeros, in case the number is belong 100:

[[Category:Imperial German Army, World War I|IR 021]]

With WikiTree BEE you can easily create regiment categories while being on the GenWiki page about the regiment. It will usually also take care of the sorting key mentioned above.

If you're using the The Great War sticker and you perceive the category name too long for that, feel free to repeat the shorter form in the units parameter, while keeping the line one in unit. Like this the short one will be displayed, but the long one will be used as category.

Still to be done here

• integrate World War II into this paragraph

Categories in German

All categories containing German names instead of English ones should be sorted into a subcategory of Category: Kategorien. There should also be a matching English category name. Categories with same meaning and different language should be linked using Template:Aka.

There is also a Category:Berufe as German equivalent to the other translated versions of Category: Occupations. It mainly consists of subcategories of Category: Deutschland, Berufe aka Category:Germany, Occupations in order to group "Germans" with that said occupation. In order to prevent confusion with potential surname categories, these subcategories receive the suffix (Beruf) for example Category: Deutschland, Schneider (Beruf).

Maintenance Categories

The categories below Category: Germany, Maintenance Categories can be used for marking and finding profiles requiring work. Among those categories are:

• Category: Germany, Needs Birth Record - should only be used if it is roughly clear, in which place to look
• Category: Germany Family Brick Walls - should be used for cases where only a state or region of origin is known instead of a exact place. Maybe our hints on How to break down your German immigrant brick wall help you finding a place to look at.
  • Category: Germany, Family Brick Wall Parents - in case somebody also created the parents for person of more or less unknown origin, those can be put here, because it's rather unlikely for them to be solved, before the birth of their child is found. Consider not creating profiles for parents you only have names for.
• Category: Germany, Unsourced Profiles - for profiles (mostly) containing Template:Unsourced, because they don't have any sources, might be used in Source-a-Thons
• Category: Germany, Needs Profiles Created - for profiles containing (hopefully sourced) data of additional people, from which one could create profiles, might be used in Connect-a-Thons
• Category: Germany, Needs Research - general category, that often contains profiles unclear what research is needed exactly. Instead of using this category, add a meaningful Research Notes section about what needs to be researched and use
  • Category: Germany, Needs Research And Has Research Notes - for profiles, where it was made clear, what needs to be researched.

Please consider avoiding the use of too general categories like Category: Germany, Needs More Records and use specific ones like Category: Germany, Needs Birth Record instead.

Historically there's also Category: German Roots Project Maintenance Categories, which should be dissolved and merged with the previous one in medium term. The same hopefully might happen to Category: Germany, Needs More Records one day.

Help

If you are unsure which category to use or how to create one, feel free to ask for support via one of our means of communication in the Germany Project or to reach out to the Germany Categorization Team either individually or by leaving a comment.