October trip to Germany seeking ancestral home area

Have you looked at dbahn for trains to Kassel and Premnitz? Both have train stations. You could Google each town for car rentals. What city are you flying into?

Google maps has current geographic references and spellings. Wikipedia has copies of Baedecker's travel guides to much of Europe from the later 1800's scanned and reviewable on the website. You might try looking up those town names on the indices and local maps that are included. Many names change over time or get overwhelmed by being small villages incorporated into larger towns.

Good luck.

For prior research about Schwalm-Eder-Kreis a good approach can be IKAN - the multi-community archive system of Hessen state. It contains also church and family archives. Address and contact data in Bad Hersfeld which is part of long-distance train network from Deutsche Bahn. Maybe an idea to start by rental car from there.

Ensure to have driving permission, not dirver license only.

Dagobertshausen is a very small village with 300 inhabitants. Bützer is even smaller. Dagobertshausen nowadays belongs to a political unit called Malsfeld, wheras Bützer belongs to a unit called Mirower Land. From Kassel you can reach Dagobertshausen by train and bus, but it's a little complicated. It's even more complicated to reach Bützer. Assuming you arrive at Frankfurt airport you can easily get to Kassel, but Bützer is a terrible outlier. If I were you I would do Dagobertshausen, but not Bützer. If you have a rental car Bützer still is an outlier. You can hardly do anything in these tiny villages.

I did an ancestral trip with my father last year and it was outstanding. I'm not familiar with the areas you mention, but we did a few things in advance that might help you as well.

First, we searched for the archivist in each town before we went. This is not as easy as it looks. A few times I resorted to emailing the office of the mayor or head of the town and working my way toward the right person. There is someone who knows how to find your family roots. I do not speak German, so I sent an email in English, then ran it through Google translate and copied that to the end of the email. I figure they will get the point. Let them know the dates you are traveling as well, as they were often willing to meet with us to help.

Next, we learned there are two types of records in Germany. The church records, which have births, baptisms, marriages, and deaths; and the state records, which have addresses and often occupations. These records can be located anywhere. For example, my family came from Siegburg, south of Cologne. The family church is still standing, but the church records of our ancestors are not in those archives. They were in Cologne. (And we visited the archive and found them - amazing experience.) I wanted to find exact addresses of family (state records) but we learned, while we were in Cologne, that those records were in Duisburg, outside the scope of our vacation.

We were hoping to find gravestones or cemeteries of our ancestors. We quickly gave up on that as burial sites in Germany apparently have to be consistently paid for, and once the family leaves the area, the specific site is reused.

And finally, be patient. A lot of records were destroyed covering certain time periods. If your data is showing up on Ancestry or Family History, you will have better luck. And sometimes we felt like we were on an endless goose chase. At some point, we just had to say "Good enough for now!" and enjoyed our vacation.

Hopefully you can find addresses and gravesites as I think it would add to the experience. But just being in the town and walking the streets of your ancestors is still an amazing experience and I wish you well. Good luck!

Scott