Germany Project Category Guidelines

Profile manager: Florian Straub [send private message]

This page is a part of the Germany Project
WikiTree Guidance on Categories
Feel free to join the Germany Categorization Team!

Sven, Alexandra and Flo talking about Names, Location and Categories for German Profiles on WikiTree Day 2023

High Level Categories

NOTE: The categories below are "high level categories" and should serve as a starting point to categorizing. Please do NOT add individual profiles to these categories. Instead add profiles to the narrowest category possible, starting with the subcategories named in each high-level category.

• Category: Germany
• Category: German Nobility (please categorize to proper house)

Location Categories

As opposed to location fields for birth, marriage and death, which are supposed to be used in their historic form at the time of the event, German location field categories for places resemble the present structure of Germany. Like this, both aspects are combined in a profile.

For detailed information on how to name and categorize location categories, please refer to the guide on Structure and how to use regional categories for Germany.

Please only use present day categories instead of using subcategories of Category: German History/Category: Former German Territories. Since the structure of what is now Germany changed quite frequently, it is impossible to also have different historical categories for villages and cities per time frame. As opposed to the migration categories, the location categories are supposed to be named in German.

Historical German territory categories should also not be used to categorize nobility carrying the name of their territory (e.g. members of the family Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen are supposed to be categorized below Category:House of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen rather than below a Category:Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen).

This only applies to locations that belong to today's Germany. Locations that used to belong to Germany, but are now situated in other European countries, can be categorized by their former German name and historical location (e.g. Category: Königsberg, Königsberg, Ostpreußen). These categories can be linked to their present-day equivalent in the current country using Template:Aka, like explained on the page about the Categorization structure for Prussia (in present-day Poland only), which will synchronize the profiles in both categories. Banat Location Categories use the same mechanism.

A way of creating present-day location categories without too much typing effort is using either WikiTree BEE (demo) or a bookmarklet to generate the category code from Wikipedia. The TNG version of the bookmarklet also tries to guess counties and states.

Migration Categories

Germany-related migration categories in general follow the Migration Category Structure. But as opposed to the location categories, the categories for migration from location A to location B are in English and use historic names. That's what the subcategories of Category: German History are for.

Generally migration categories should include the kind of territory, they refer to, e.g. county ("Grafschaft"), duchy ("Herzogtum"), electorate ("Kurfürstentum"), free imperial city ("Freie Reichsstadt"), kingdom ("Königreich"), landgraviate ("Landgrafschaft"), lordship ("Herrschaft", margraviate ("Markgrafschaft"), prince-bishopric ("Fürstbistum", "Hochstift") or principality ("Fürstentum"). Only for historical/legacy reasons are currently a few exceptions to this rule, e.g. the categories for Prussia, Württemberg and Lippe.

The migration categories simplify German territorial history a bit, in order to maintain less categories (and more sanity). The top level categories for people emigrating from what is now Germany to another country:

• Category: Holy Roman Empire, Emigrants (emigration until 1806)
• Category: German Confederation, Emigrants (emigration between 1806 and 1870)
• Category: German Empire, Emigrants (emigration between 1871 and World War II)
• Category: Germany, Emigrants (only for emigration after World War II and today)

Same goes for people immigrating to what is now Germany:

• Category: Holy Roman Empire, Immigrants (immigration until 1806)
• Category: German Confederation, Immigrants (immigration between 1806 and 1870)
• Category: German Empire, Immigrants (immigration between 1871 and World War II)
• Category: Germany, Immigrants (only for immigration after World War II and today)

The migration categories also ignore the change from noble reigns (kingdoms, duchies ...) to republics in the early 20th century. Therefore, for example, the category Category: Grand Duchy of Baden, Emigrants covers both German Confederation and German Empire until 1945, even though it was the Republic of Baden since 1918.

Profiles with migration from and to the German Democratic Republic ("East Germany") between 1949 and 1990 should use the subcategories of Category: German Democratic Republic (East Germany), Emigrants and Category: German Democratic Republic (East Germany), Immigrants.

For an overview over existing migration categories through the middle of the 19th century, check out German Diaspora: Emigration during the mid-19th Century.

Some sub projects also have migrant categories of their own:

• Germanna Colonies America: German settlement in the Colony of Virginia starting in 1714.
• Prussian Settlement in Australia - German Australians team page. This team is mainly focussed on Prussian emigrants to Australia and is run by the Australia Project.
• Markham Berczy Settlers: adding the 64 German families who arrived in Upper Canada (now Ontario) in 1794 with William Berczy and settled in Markham Township.
• German Brazilians: From 1824 to 1969, around 250,000 Germans emigrated to Brazil. The earliest colonists arrived between 1818-1824, forming the colonies in Ilhéus, Bahia, São Jorge and São Leopoldo.

The bookmarklet MigrationCategoryHelper.js makes setting up location categories a lot easier by filling in most of the parameters based on the name of the category. Meanwhile the WikiTree Browser Extension will also automatically populate the template code, if you open a new migration category edit view.

Cemetery Categories

Categories for cemeteries in present-day Germany should be categorized below Category: Germany, Cemeteries in the subcategory of the state. Although the German states below this category are in English (e.g. "Bavaria" instead of "Bayern"), the actual cemetery category names should contain the German state name, since the cemetery category will also be listed below the corresponding location category, which also has it's name in German spelling.

For example, the Category: Waldfriedhof Dachsberg, Kamp-Lintfort, Nordrhein-Westfalen, is categorized below Category: North Rhine-Westphalia, Cemeteries (via the "parent" parameter in Template:CategoryInfoBox Cemetery), as well as below Category: Kamp-Lintfort, Nordrhein-Westfalen (via the "location" parameter). A county or city subcategory of Category: North Rhine-Westphalia, Cemeteries, would still use the English state name.

Early Deaths

The subcategories of these categories should be filled with present-day German state names in English.

• Category:Germany, Stillbirth
• Category:Germany, Infant Mortality
• Category:Germany, Child Mortality

Categories in German

All categories containing German names instead of English ones should be sorted into a subcategory of Category: Kategorien. There should also be a matching English category name. Categories with same meaning and different language should be linked using Template:Aka.

There is also a Category:Berufe as German equivalent to the other translated versions of Category: Occupations. It mainly consists of subcategories of Category: Deutschland, Berufe aka Category:Germany, Occupations in order to group "Germans" with that said occupation. In order to prevent confusion with potential surname categories, these subcategories receive the suffix (Beruf) for example Category: Deutschland, Schneider (Beruf).

Maintenance Categories

The categories below Category: Germany, Maintenance Categories can be used for marking and finding profiles requiring work. Among those categories are:

• Category: Germany, Needs Birth Record - should only be used if it is roughly clear, in which place to look
• Category: Germany Family Brick Walls - should be used for cases where only a state or region of origin is known instead of a exact place. Maybe our hints on How to break down your German immigrant brick wall help you finding a place to look at.
  • Category: Germany, Family Brick Wall Parents - in case somebody also created the parents for person of more or less unknown origin, those can be put here, because it's rather unlikely for them to be solved, before the birth of their child is found. Consider not creating profiles for parents you only have names for.
• Category: Germany, Unsourced Profiles - for profiles (mostly) containing Template:Unsourced, because they don't have any sources, might be used in Source-a-Thons
• Category: Germany, Needs Profiles Created - for profiles containing (hopefully sourced) data of additional people, from which one could create profiles, might be used in Connect-a-Thons
• Category: Germany, Needs Research - general category, that often contains profiles unclear what research is needed exactly. Instead of using this category, add a meaningful Research Notes section about what needs to be researched and use
  • Category: Germany, Needs Research And Has Research Notes - for profiles, where it was made clear, what needs to be researched.

Please consider avoiding the use of too general categories like Category: Germany, Needs More Records and use specific ones like Category: Germany, Needs Birth Record instead.

Historically there's also Category: German Roots Project Maintenance Categories, which should be dissolved and merged with the previous one in medium term. The same hopefully might happen to Category: Germany, Needs More Records one day.

Help

If you are unsure which category to use or how to create one, feel free to ask for support via one of our means of communication in the Germany Project or to reach out to the Germany Categorization Team either individually or by leaving a comment.