Need help find ANY records in Alsace Lorraine in about 1876
Hello I have been trying to search for several months to help my grandma learn more information about her father. I can't seem to find any information from when he was born in Alsace Lorraine until he arrived in the US and was naturalized. Here is all the information my grandma and I have managed to gather that might be helpful.
My grandma's Maiden name is Bernice Vornbrock. Her father was John Clemens Vornbrock. He was born in Alsace Lorraine about Jan 12 1876 although some US documents have a different birthdate (the birthday was corrected by his wife Erna Herman-Vornbrock after he died. There was some confusion as to why documents were incorrect).
We know John Clemens father was Johann Gerhard Ferdinand Von-Brocke born Feb 1943 (Johanns parents were Theodore Von-Brocke and Maria Goda). John Clemens mother was the first wife of Johann Gerhard Ferdinand and she was buried in Minnesota under the name Maria Angelina Vornbrock although her father also knew her with the name Sophia and believe she was born about 1836 and passed in 1890. We believe that all the family immigrated to the US in about 1880.
unsure if it's helpful but John Clemens had four full blood siblings- Bernard, Bernadina, Heinrich (believed to have passed at 13 in Germany), and Elisabeth.
Im not sure where distant family got this info but we have heard that John Clemens mother's maiden name may be either Rodenstein or Bodenstein.
ANY information that you may have or suggestions on where else I could look would be greatly appreciated. My grandma would love to know more about her fathers side. Thank you!
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Hi Bernice,
Maybe you are already aware of this but someone has already uploaded a lot of info on your family here on familysearch (John Clemens's ID is G9C7-SGR). They have input that he was actually born in Alfhausen in Germany. If this is correct then I think you will likely be able to find his birth record, and marriage records for his ancestors in Germany, on ancestry if you have a world explorer membership (I don't have recent ancestors in Germany so I don't know how complete ancestry's collection of German vital records is but I do know that it's extensive).
If you believe this birth location is incorrect, but you don't know which commune or even department of Alsace-Lorraine he was born in, then your best bet to find these records would be on filae, where you can search over all of France or over a particular region or department. (Birth, marriage, and death records are freely available online through each department's archives' website but the situation is different for each department; in many (most?) departments, the records that are freely available are un-indexed scans broken down by commune. So for example, starting with Moselle, you could pull up images of birth records for 1876 for Aboncourt and check those for him...then Aboncourt-sur-Seille...then Abreschviller....through all 725 communes in Moselle. Then moving onto the other four departments in Alsace-Lorraine....you get the idea, not really feasible.)
If you can't get a free trial of an ancestry world explorer or filae membership and you don't want to pay, then I know familysearch is indexing more and more French and German records all the time, so eventually these should all be available for free on here if you wait.
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(If you would like to check for yourself what records are free for Alsace-Lorraine, you can click on each department here https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/Alsace-Lorraine,_France_Genealogy and then follow the link to each departmental archive under "Church Records and Civil Registration (Registres Paroissiaux and Etat Civil) Online")
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