The Sort of Thing Only A Family Historian Can Get Excited About....!

The sort of thing that only a family historian can get excited about: the parish registers of St. Cyriakus in Bottrop, Germany, have finally been digitized and are available online! I have been waiting for this moment for over 20 years, ever since I managed to briefly get access to them during a trip to Germany in the early 2000s. The volunteer church archivist kindly met up with me to let me in and I spent a couple of frantic hours copying whatever I could, but of course it was not nearly enough time.

And here are the first of my ancestors to appear in the oldest surviving parish record book: Johann auf den Radkinn (one of at least 20 spelling variants of the name which would eventually late in the 19th century become Rötgens) married Elisabeth Holtkamp on Jul 13, 1681.

Have you made any exciting discoveries lately?