Good sources in the Kaiserstuhl region – difficult in West Pomerania

The Kath line can be divided into two parts. First, the paternal line of Hertha Martha Kath. Her father, Otto Paul Emil Kath, came from West Pomerania. This region is now Polish, and family research there is accordingly difficult. Most documents have been destroyed and some are in various archives – not centralised and difficult to find. I have taken my data on these ancestors from the proof of ancestry from the 1930s of my grandparents and my great-aunt.

Otto Paul Emil Kath married Ida Diebold, who came from southern Germany. Here, we have Ida’s paternal line, which originates from Hohenzollern, and the maternal line from the Kaiserstuhl region, mainly Eichstetten. Hohenzollern was Catholic, therefore these are not included in Archion (a Protestant church register portal). In addition to viewing the church records on the Archion portal, there is also a very good, 893-page thick Eichstetten local family book from 2002 (“Ortsfamilienbuch Eichstetten, Eichstetten am Kaiserstuhl 1644-1900” by Kurt Heinzmann).

A detailed listing can be found here in the form of a Kekulé-sorted ancestry list.