Landeskirchenarchiv Eisenach
Ernst-Thälmann-Straße 88
99817 Eisenach / Germany
For historical reasons, the Protestant Church in Central Germany has two regional church archives - one located in Eisenach, the other in Magdeburg - that are responsible for different territories within the borders of the Protestant Church in Central Germany.
The Regional Church Archive Eisenach (Landeskirchenarchiv Eisenach)
administers the historic heritage of the former Protestant-Lutheran Church in Thuringia. In former times, it comprised large parts of today’s federal state Thuringia as well as smaller peripheral areas of today’s federal state Saxony-Anhalt. An exception is the area around the town of Schmalkalden. Until today, it has belonged to the Protestant Church of Kurhessen-Waldeck.
The Regional Church Archive Magdeburg (Landeskirchenarchiv Magdeburg)
administers the historic heritage of the former Protestant Church of the church province Saxony. It used to comprise the territory of the former Prussian province Saxony and the bigger part of today’s federal state Saxony-Anhalt (without Anhalt), large parts of Thuringia, and smaller peripheral areas of the federal states Brandenburg and Saxony.
The complete inventory comprises appr. 60,000 Protestant church books from more than 3,000 parishes in which church acts such as baptisms, marriages, funerals, and confirmations were registered. The church books are hand-written in old German script. The earliest specimens date from the 1520s. Only after the Thirty Years War, church records were introduced extensively.
All historic church records of the Protestant Church in Central Germany are made accessible, micro-filmed, digitized from films and then progessively published on Archion by the two Regional Church Archives in Eisenach and Magdeburg. In the long run, it is planned to present all church districts online.
Currently, church books from 16 of the 37 church districts of the Protestant Church in Central Germany are available. Further church districts will follow, but the order of publication is not yet defined. Please note that not all historic church books within a church district will always go online immediately, and there may be occasional subsequent deliveries at a later stage.
If you need a church book for your family research that is not (yet) recorded online with Archion, it is possible to conduct research on site in the Regional Church Archives in Eisenach and Magdeburg. Micro-films of the church books already recorded from the respective administrative area will be available there. Please find further information on the homepages of the respective archives:
Landeskirchenarchiv Eisenach | Genealogie (landeskirchenarchiv-eisenach.de)
Landeskirchenarchiv Magdeburg | Familienforschung (landeskirchenarchiv-magdeburg.de)