About Karl
Karl is the youngest sibling and only US-born member of his family. The birthplaces of his older siblings trace a historical trail starting near Lublin, Poland to Warthegau and then into West Germany within 20-30 kilometers of the East German border. Prior to this all his ancestors lived in Russian Poland since the very early 1800s and by 1870 they all had settled near Lublin.
Although the action of EWZ had provided his family with much of this genealogical data giving Karl a great head start, it was his desire to dig deeper that led him to SGGEE, where Sigrid Pohl Perry and he shortly discovered they were 3rd cousins. Our backgrounds are so similar and the research projects we undertook naturally involved cooperation between us and other “Lublinites.” His research has also brought him in contact with previously unknown 3rd, 4th, and 5th cousins, the latter of which includes a close friend of his in Maryland since 1981, only discovering this surprising relationship after they had known each other for over 25 years.
Since becoming a member of SGGEE in 2003 Karl has led an EWZ extraction project for Germans in the Lublin area, which is deposited in the Master Pedigree Database (MPD), headed the indexing of the Lublin Digital Archive, and is the current SGGEE webmaster.
Karl and his wife Brenda have two sons but are now empty nesters living in Gaithersburg, Maryland. He works at the National Cancer Institute administrating programs attempting to achieve early detection of cancer. His background in biochemistry and molecular biology prompted him to become a genealogical pioneer for SGGEE into a new realm of DNA research involving next generation sequencing, where now complete human genome sequencing is relatively affordable. Unfortunately, it is too premature to present experiences with this “data download” as he only obtained his genome sequence in May.
About his presentation: EWZ Indexes
Since 2017 Family Search had posted online 68 microfilms of EWZ Stammblätter (ancestral pages) corresponding to over 300,000 records. Family Search does not provide an index to determine where persons processed through EWZ might be found in this collection. This talk will provide an overview of EWZ, what you might learn from these records, describe how these records are ordered, and what resources are available to find the Stammblatt number for anyone of interest you suspect was processed through EWZ.
The first of these resources we will discuss is available online in Germany referred to as Invenio. The second resource is available within the MPD database of SGGEE. Many years ago a project by several SGGEE volunteers had extracted genealogical information of people from the Lubelskie province from EWZ for inclusion in MPD. For those who wish to research their relatives from the Lublin/Chelm area this extracted information provides an index for the corresponding Stammblatt numbers which can now be easily found online. SGGEE has posted a spreadsheet displaying the Stammblatt number ranges for the different towns of this region making it possible for anyone to do online research of these communities as they existed at the outbreak of World War II.
In order to give practical instruction on how to find specific Stammblatt numbers (the key to finding the records you are interested in) this presentation will demonstrate the use of the Invenio site and also give instruction on using the spreadsheet index provided by Team Lublin. Additional discussion will describe the challenges of trying to find records in this collection from other localities of interest to SGGEE members such as Polish Volhynia, Galicia, and other regions of eastern Poland. In addition, a short deviation will reveal documentation on using the Odessa Digital Library to research EWZ records from Soviet Russia pre-World War II. Handouts.
