One of our readers sent us a rather interesting document: the Sippenfragebogen for his relative Ewald Oskar Klebusch.

It seems that this form was needed to be filled out during the Nazi time as a sort of family questionnaire. View the document here.

More information about where these types of records can be found is unknown to us at the current time. If you have more information about them, please feel free to email us so we can update this page.

For this particular entry, it seems that Ewald Oskar Klebusch was born on October 3, 1895 in Denzin, Stolp and was an Arbeiter, or a laborer. It gives his current address, religion at birth, whether he was a twin, his birth order (fifth) out of ten children, how many siblings were stillborn and how many were still living, whether his parents were blood relatives, level of schooling, and any illnesses. In Ewald’s case, he was wounded in the war on June 2, 1918. He was seen by a doctor in 1915 for mustering.

The document continues, listing his parents and his wife’s parents, and–luckily–his grandparents. These records could be especially useful for those looking to trace their lineage to the mid-1800s if civil records no longer exist. However, where these can be found is something of a mystery. What can be said is that there was a Reichsstelle für Sippenforschung that collected these types of questionnaires for race research. While some of these records were destroyed before being added to the master file, it is assumed that a large portion of these records still survive today. What is not known is whether the specific survey sent to us is of a larger part to an archive or if more of these exist in private holdings. Many of these Nazi-era relics were outlawed in the German Democratic Republic.

This once again builds the argument that these documents once used for tragic and horrible purposes have the potential to do good in our modern times, filling in gaps for non-existent registry books and unlocking more information for Pomeranian family histories.