Records in Saxony

[Jane Margaret]

My daughter and I have combed German parish records all over that country and found many “gold mines” of information about our ancestors. However, Saxony seems to have spotty records at best. Are we looking in the wrong places? Have wars destroyed so many records? Did the fact that so many parts of Saxony lie in former East Germany? Please let me know where to find complete birth/marriage/death records in Saxony.  Thanks!

[Donald Askey]

Jane Margaret, I have limited experience with church records in Saxony, but I do know that many are not available on line.  You may wish to wish to make a query to the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Genealogie Thüringen (AGT) at https://agt-gen.de.  You'll want to be as specific as possible, particularly religion and dates.

[sabine]

It depends on what time period you talk about.
When you for example go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saxony you can see, that Saxony over the centuries changed the borders, like many other parts of Germany. It can be confusing like finding an ancestor in Prussia. Saxony today is not the Saxony from ,let's say, 150 years ago.

more here: https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/Saxony_(Sachsen),_Germany_Genealogy

Many German Parish registers are in the process to be published on archion.de, but it comes with a subscription fee. Parts of the German Churches have issues with copyrights

Of course you can write directly to the parish or for events after 1874 you can write to the Standesamt of the place you search in.

Another chance to get information are the German genealogy mailing lists
https://list.genealogy.net/mm/listinfo/  , for you the Sachsen-L. But since Saxony has changed over the centuries, you also might try the Sachsen-Anhalt-L, Thueringen-L .

Many people in the lists had English in school, so it could be worth a try too.

Sabine