Hi Elise,
your first step to obtain a birth certificate for your mother would be to
find out where currently the records from the "Standesamt" are located".
Starting in 1874 to 1876 the birth of a child was documented in Germany at a
local government office - the Standesamt. During the time before, there were
only the church book entries. Just recently there was a change in law
allowing the Standesamt to transfer their "old records" (birth older than
110 years, marriage older than 80 years and death older than 30 years) to
the responsible local archive, whatever that may be. Many of these transfers
have happened, but not all of them.
Your mother was born in 1926 - so the records should still be in the local
Standesamt.
I am living in Berlin / Germany and I am not really familiar with the local
government structure in Bremerhaven. Lehe is part of Bremerhaven nowadays.
If there is a separate Standesamt for Lehe, I don't know. Bremerhaven has a
website, which your might switch to English language:
But most content is displayed in German.
There is a German article about obtaining birth certificates from this
Standesamt on this website:
<http://www.bremerhaven.de/buergerservice/aemter-einrichtungen/stadtverwaltu
ng/standesamt/geburtsurkunde.14085.html>
Anyway, it will cost 10 Euro per certificate, which will cause you probably
some more problems, just to transfer the money from the US.
Maybe you just try and contact them by email:
Standesamt@magistrat.bremerhaven.de
For the moment - good luck!
Greetings from Berlin
Walter
BTW: I have been with IBM and stayed in San Jose during the 1980s for about
2 years.