A friend and I were just talking about all the information
we found in American newspaper morgues, when the thought
struck us--Are there German newspaper morgues and if so
how do you get into them?
I received the following e-mail from Paul Rakow on the Pommern List. It may be of interest to some members of this list.
Gale
Gale,
There are collections of old newspapers, though in Germany they are kept in libraries, not morgues.
The biggest collection of Pommern papers is in the University Library in Greifswald, other large collections are in the University Library in Rostock and the Natonal Library in Berlin.
I think in general not as much has been microfilmed in Germany as in America, you are more likely to get originals to look at for local papers, big city papers have often been filmed.
The German papers don't have obituaries of 'ordinary' people like you see in American local papers, but they do have advertisements placed by the families of those who've died, listing the surviving
relatives. That will often give a death date and birth date, and a woman's maiden name.
There are other interesting adverts, looking through the Bublitz paper from the 1880s I saw lots of 'honour advertisements' of the type "I'm sorry for what I said last week about X, signed Y" (which would make you want to know more about the story), official notices such as "X, Y and Z are officially declared to be notorious drunkards, and everyone is warned not to let them have any Schnapps", occasionally advertisements that a family is about to emigrate (I think the idea was to give people a chance to collect any debts owed), notices of bankruptcy sales, and also (which could be an excellent source of information) advertisements looking for possible heirs. Once a year there was a list of the men called up for the Army.
I've used the newspapers in the National Library in Berlin (on Unter den Linden), though the paper where I actually found the most was the "Volksbote Wochenblatt", a German-language paper from Shawano County in Wisconsin. Why that was sitting in Berlin is a mystery to me.