Regensburg

Are you a member of Ancestry? It's a great resource for genealogy. Also, taking a DNA test will reveal the geographic origins of your ancestors. We have discovered so much of our family history through these two sources. Have a wonderful time. We have been to Regensburg once for an overnight stay and returning this December for a couple of nights.

This is a place to start for thinking about contacting record keeping organizations in Regensburg—mainly the Catholic Churches. https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/Regensburg,_Bavaria,_Germany_Genealogy

Do you have the name and approximate date of the relative who immigrated?

We were fortunate to have the passport (reissepass) of my great grandfather who immigrated in the late 1800s that helped pinpoint which family he’d come from. Even in his small town there were two branches of the same family.

If you are going in May you should start now if you have any information on which to launch contact and a search.

And, welcome to the travel forum.

I think you need to start at the other end, and see if you can trace back US birth records, marriage licenses, etc., to identify the ancestors who came to the US, and then see if you can find their immigration records. Those will often show you where they came from, family connections etc. Then birth records abroad can be found.

We took Lynda's advice a few years back. My wife and I had our DNA analyzed and we subscribed to Ancestry, the international version. Ancestry is not cheap in terms of money or time spent. It can be addictive. Answers generate more questions. A single subscription can be used on more than one tree. It can be a great journey if you put in the time.

It much changed my ideas about my ancestors. I had to give up the wrong idea that I was an Irish-American (only 12%).

My family comes from England, Ireland, the Netherlands, Wales, Scotland, France, etc. We often came to escape religious persecution. Some of my ancestors came as unaccompanied minors. A few came as indentured servants.

My wife is black. It is amazing what we found on Ancestry but the scarcity of facts was sometimes its own story.

Just to add to my earlier comment about Ancestry or any of the other genealogy sites that contain family tree info, be somewhat skeptical about family trees posted that do not have links to the specific records supporting the info (i.e.census forms, birth or death certificates, marriage records, etc.). These docs are usually available for search on Ancestry once you are a member and can lead you to other family members.Best of luck!!Sometimes you may feel as though you are following multiple threads.

I agree with Stan that you need to start at your end of the story and work your way back. You can of course, like some visitors do, just randomly walk over cemeteries and look for names, but that is not going to tell you anything about possible relationships.

Try and find out the oldest ancestor who bore that name, and then go from there. If you speak or at least understand just a little bit of German, you might try this website. It's not complete by any means, but you might be lucky and find something useful. And unlike Ancestry, it's free. This map might also be of interest to you, though I am not sure if that is based on any more comprehensive data than the phone book.

Be aware that in Germany, most church records don't go farther back than the Thirty Years' War. If any records existed before that time, they were usually destroyed during that war. This also means that you should not set your hopes too high on actually finding the specific origins of your name. Most family names are much older than the 17th century.

My maiden name is derived from the name of a town too, and there is a concentration of people with that name in the neighboring towns, not in the town itself. My theory is that when someone moved from this town to another one, he would be called "the one from ..." by his neighbors, and the name of the town eventually stuck as a family name.

As far as the DNA analysis goes, make sure you read up on that before actually having it done. There may be several sides to that. One important question is: What does the testing company do with the results? Is there some kind of privacy agreement, or can they just sell your personal data to other companies (like insurances) or hand it over to government agencies? Are you o.k. with possibly finding out things you didn't want to know?

Not meaning to advise you against having that done, just saying that it's important to weigh the advantages against the drawbacks, and see what matters most to you.

Don't miss going to see the 1000 year old bridge and the restaurant near there. The restaurant is in the building that was built when the bridge was built. There are great bratwurst there.

Oh that's easy! You most certainly have some family history there. How cool. There's really no other reason for you to have that as your family name! But your ancestors who lived there long ago may have only gone by one name, and took the name of their town when they left. Last names (other than 'son of' patronymics, such as Ludwig Von Carl) weren't really commonly used until personal taxation became a thing. So enjoy your visit to 'your town', and have fun imagining what things were like there several hundred ears ago! Regensburg has a preserved medieval core so it's a great setting for this dreaming.

I recommend that you dive into German and European history to find out what the 'push' factors were that compelled emigration. The emigration museum near Hamburg - https://www.bremerhaven.de/en/tourism/museums-adventure-worlds/german-emigration-center-bremerhaven.16186.html - makes for a fantastic visit. There are many good books recommended elsewhere on this site, and many on Audible.

You are getting good advice on the ancestry hunt. I have found paying for a subscription on Ancestry to be very worthwhile. I didn't find the DNA testing to be very helpful, since it didn't tell me anything that I didn't already know from my research on Ancestry. The advice to be careful about genealogies without sources is right on. Lots of people have claimed links to royalty that can't be proven with source documents. Basically, fewer documents means that the person wasn't economically important in that time, so was most likely a laborer.

All you need to start is the birth and death date of your ancestor with the Regensburg name. Add everything else that you know - his spouse, his parents? Plug this into the Ancestry or Family Search site and it will look through its database to find the parentage. Keep sifting through the offerings, accept what looks right and reject what doesn't, and you will most likely find your way back to your immigrant.

I have a great grandfather with the last name of the town that he came from in Luxembourg. It was wonderful to go there and drive around, trying to imagine what the road conditions were like back in the days of the horse-drawn carts. He would have seen the castles up on the hill, maybe even sold produce from his garden to the castle kitchen, but would he ever have entered? I doubt it! I have so much more freedom and possibility than he did, because I could enter that castle!
The culture was very Catholic and oriented to church activities, so there are many documents of life milestones in the parish churches, and it is all in Latin, and their names are Latinized. That tells me that they were anchored to their church and farms and didn't leave the area for generations, until something happened to impel this man to leave with his family. He likely left due to farmland being destroyed in the Napoleonic wars, and he had 5 daughters and no sons to help him rebuild his farmlands. So he led them all to America. The bravery and desperation astounds me.