Hometown register

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Home location indexes ( HOK ) are the systematic records of the German population in the former German eastern and settlement areas according to their place of residence as of September 1, 1939.

They emerged as a community aid organization of Caritas and Diakonie from the tracing service heads of the Church Tracing Service , founded in 1945 , whose primary task was to reunite families who had separated through flight and expulsion and to clarify the fate of the missing.

By October 1946, almost six million displaced persons had fled from eastern Germany to western Germany, desperately looking for their relatives. The activity of the Church Tracing Service began through improvised search and reporting points at parish offices. Mostly volunteer helpers went from camp to camp, wrote down the personal details of refugees passing through and transferred them to index cards and lists in alphabetical order. The registration cards and search cards created in this way were compared with one another and if they matched, seekers and wanted people could be brought together (principle of encounter). It soon became apparent that a very special type of tracing service was developing here, which stood out from the general tracing service due to the number of people and the spatial limitation. For the first time, the tracing service reporting head in Hanover came up with the idea of ​​not only registering refugees alphabetically, but also according to their former home. So a location index was created in addition to the name index - the first hometown index. The great advantage of this restructuring was that the research could be done actively. There was no longer any need to wait for the search and registration files to meet; the fate of the missing could now be clarified by questioning former neighbors and friends from home.

On December 1, 1947, the overall management of the hometown lists was officially affiliated to the Munich headquarters of the German Caritas Association.

With almost complete records for more than 20 million people, the Church Tracing Service with its home town indexes performed important tasks as a residents' registration office for Germans from the former German east and settlement areas on behalf of the federal government. After the Church Tracing Service ceased operations in 2015, the documents were handed over to the Federal Archives in 2016 .

Web links

• The use of the hometown indexes of the church tracing service in genealogy , Edith Wagner (Federal Archives); November 22, 2017 (pdf)