From German Girls Genealogy (Teresa Steinkamp McMillin & Debra A. Hoffman):
In my last post, I talked about the northern part of the historic Rhineland area that is currently in North Rhine Westphalia. In this post, I’ll talk about the southern part of this region in today’s Rhineland-Palatinate [Rheinland-Pfalz in German] and Saarland.
Many Germans who arrived in Colonial America came from the Palatinate region, which is why they were known as Palatines. Bavaria controlled part of this region for a time and that area was known as the Bavarian Pfalz. To read more about the histories of these specific regions, see my prior blog post.
Because a lot of this area was under French control in the late 1700s, there are often civil records from 1798. This was the area west of the Rhine River, also referred to as the west bank of the Rhine. If you are researching in one of these areas, you want to be sure you check both the church records [Kirchenbücher] and the civil records [Zivil- und Personenstandsurkunden]. They may each contain unique information.
The Verein für Computergenealogie recently posted about locations of civil registration and church books for the region.
The Rhineland-Palatinate state archive is divided between the Speyer and Koblenz branches. They have the civil records and church books from 1876 and after. Be mindful that German privacy laws restrict birth records less than 110 years, death records less than thirty years, and marriage records less than eighty years.[1]
The duplicate civil registers and marriage announcements are housed at the Rhineland-Palatinate Civil Registry Archive in Koblenz. Now you know where these records may be found. The disappointing part is they are not online. But knowing where records are housed is the first step to determining how to access them.
Finally, the Saarland State Archives in Saarbrücken hold the duplicate copies of civil records for their area. Fortunately, these are digitized and available on Ancestry.
For church books, the Catholic records for the Diocese of Speyer as well as the records of the Lutheran Central Archive and the State Archive in Speyer are digitized (not searchable) on Archion.
To find records for your specific town, check the above resources. Also check the FamilySearch Catalog, using place name and keyword searches. In my last post, I mentioned the FamilySearch Research Wiki article about the Rhineland area, but it bears repeating.
Ancestry has selected databases for Germany. It also has databases specific to the Rhineland-Palatinate and for Saarland.
I hope you found this helpful. Let me know what questions you have!
[1] “German Empire Civil Registration,” article, FamilySearch Research Wiki(https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/German_Empire_Civil_Registration : accessed 19 November 2025).
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