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These credentials are intended to give you an idea as to my background, so that you can be a better judge of my expertise. They are not intended to solicit research assignments.
For information as to what services I still offer, see Genealogical Services.
Edward R. Brandt, Ph.D., was a co-founder of the multinational Federation of East European Family History Societies. He served as vice-president until 1996, convention program chair in 1994 and 1995, and chair of its 1996 convention. In this capacity, he became acquainted, either personally or by reputation, with a large percentage of North American genealogical experts on all countries in Eastern, East Central and Central Europe, as well as a number for the Balkans.
He is generally familiar with a broad range of genealogical resources for Central and East European countries, but is a Germanic specialist. He was a co-founder of the Germanic Genealogy Society, served on its board in several capacities, contributes frequently to its journal (formerly newsletter), and co-authored Germanic Genealogy: A Guide to Worldwide Sources and Migration Patterns, a trail-blazing book published by that society in 1995, with an expanded 2nd edition in 1997.
He wrote most of the material on East and South European countries, as well as on immigrant countries outside Anglo-America. His contributions included chapters on the geography, history and religion of German-speaking people and also on passenger departure and arrival lists. He aided in compiling the information on resources in Germany, Austria, Luxembourg and Liechtenstein, Western Europe, the U.S. (mostly immigration) and Canada (mostly western Canada), as well as the chapters on place names (mostly list of gazetteers) and surnames (minor contributions), the extensive annotated bibliography, and the dateline of Germanic history.
Of course, no person can prepare chapters on such a broad range of countries and topics, based only on his personal experience. Therefore, much of the information he compiled came from personal contacts or extensive reading, much of it in German-language publications.
After accreditation as a German specialist in 1989, he gave an eight-lecture series on Researching Germanic Ancestors, available in published form (with a ninth booklet added since then). Some of these lectures are on topics where the material never gets dated, but others have been superseded to a greater or lesser degree by other publications, new information and changes. He did not renew his accreditation in 1999, since he is no longer engaged in Family History Library research.
He has written or translated several articles on Germans in Eastern Europe for the East European Genealogist.
Book reviews have appeared in many periodicals, including the newsletter and journal of the Germanic Genealogy Society, the Mennonite Historical Quarterly and the German-Bohemian Heritage Society Newsletter, with lecture outlines in The German Connection.
He wrote the historical background information in Where to Look for Hard-to-Find German-Speaking Ancestors in Eastern Europe: Index to 19,720 Names in 13 Books, compiled by his son. Of course, there were some 8 million German-speakers in Eastern Europe, so this book is only one volume of what would have to be a large multi-volume encyclopedia to resemble being comprehensive. The book is most comprehensive with respect to names of German immigrants to Galicia, the Banat and Batschka, the Volga and Black Sea areas in the Russian Empire (including Bessarabia) and on Mecklenburgers who migrated eastward.
In the early post-German reunification years, Ed translated, adapted and published pertinent parts of Martina Wermes's resource list as Important Addresses and Telephone Numbers For the Five New (Eastern) States of the Federal Republic of Germany, which was updated for several years. He added an appendix which included an extensive bibliography for historic East and Central Germany. But the last edition was in 1996, so quite a bit of the information is obsolete and the booklet is no longer available.
Brief articles serve as a guide to the holdings of the Austrian National Archives and the German Federal Archives. He has also written about Palatine migrants to Eastern Europe in The Palatine Immigrant and about their descendants in the Galizien German Descendants Newsletter.
"Die Familienforschung der Russlanddeutschen in Nordamerika" [Family History Research by Germans from the Russian Empire in North America] in Rainer and Irina Zielke (eds.), Ratgeber '95: Familienforschung Mittel- und Osteuropa, was written for German-speaking genealogists.
In 1991 he took a seven-week trip to Europe, with most of the time spent in Poland and Germany. Since his, his father-in-law's and his mother-in-law's ancestors represent three distinct lines of eastward migrants who were or became German-speakers and lived in what is or was Polish territory, he developed a secondary field in Polish research, but that expertise is restricted by a lack of knowledge of Polish. He cofounded the Polish Genealogical Society of Minnesota, served as program chair for several years, and still contributes to its newsletter occasionally.
He published a list of resources on Polish research in the Polish Genealogical Society of Minnesota Newsletter. This was expanded into articles published in The Minnesota Genealogist (Vol. 24, No. 2) and Heritage Quest (Heritage Creations since the beginning of 2003). The most comprehensive expansion of this was his book, Resources for Polish-American and Polish-Canadian Genealogical Research (2nd ed., 1998), which has been out of print since 1999.
Articles relevant for Polish German genealogy have also appeared in periodicals which focus on Germans in Russia.
In addition to many articles on Germanic genealogy, he has written an illustrated heritage booklet on the Mennonites in Poland, Where Once They Toiled: A Visit to the Former Mennonite Homelands in the Vistula River Valley. He served as a contributing editor for Mennonite Family History for quite a few years.
Likewise, he has a strong interest in records and resources in and for the Commonwealth of Independent States, especially Ukraine, from which all of his and his wife's ancestors came to North America. He authored or co-authored articles on genealogical resources in the former Soviet Union in the Journal of the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia, the East European GenealogistOctober 22, 2007Newsletter. These articles no longer represent the latest or most comprehensive information about the CIS.
During his 1991 trip he also visited the Hungarian National Archives. This resulted in his book on the subject, based on an out-of-print Hungarian guide, but incOctober 22, 2007k, Contents and Addresses of Hungarian Archives, has some limited supplementary information on Germans from pre-World War I Hungary. The Hungarian-American societies mentioned in the book have since both gone outOctober 22, 2007lo-Germany Family History Society in the United Kingdom. A few years ago, he belonged to more than 30 genealogical, historical or multi-purpose societies in four countries, most of them devoted to Germanic research, but including Polish, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Czech/Slovak, Rusin, Jewish and multi-ethnic groups. But in recent years he has been forced to curtail his activities.
His many genealogical lectures and seminars included appearances in Alberta, California, Colorado, Illinois, Kansas, Manitoba, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, Ohio, Saskatchewan, South Dakota, Utah and Wisconsin. Most of these dealt with Germanic topics, but he has also spoken occasionally about resources for Polish and Hungarian research, as well as on records of the former Russian Empire. Health reasons now prevent giving the all-day seminars he loves. Although Ed no longer gives all-day seminars, he occasionally accepts requests for afternoon or evening presentations
Mary K. Meyer listed him in Who's Who in Genealogy & Heraldry. He is also listed in Contemporary American Authors for his genealogical publications.
He loves the challenge of deciphering poorly handwritten material in the Gothic script. He has compiled three personal family histories, co-authored a fourth, started a fifth and plans more if possible.
He became a genealogy addict in May 1966 when he accidentally stumbled onto a gold mine of information about his mother-in-law's Galician ancestors at the Austrian National Library. This led to extensive on-site research in Europe, where he worked for seven non-consecutive years. Most of this involved checking pre-1785 records in Rhineland-Palatinate, but he also did some research in numerous other repositories (parsonages, archives) in Germany, and a few in northern Switzerland, France (Alsace) and (interwar) Poland. This included some work as a genealogical detective, unraveling puzzles where printed publications and parish registers provided incorrect information as to the place or surname. He won the Minnesota Genealogical Society's Babe the Blue Ox Award of Merit in its 1996 Paul Bunyan Tall Tales Writing Contest with "Whence the Rauschenbergers?"
The major archives and resource centers that he visited in 1985-87 or 1991 included some of those in Berlin and the most important ones in Leipzig, Marburg/Lahn, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf, Koblenz (2), Vienna, Strasbourg, Lódz, Radom, Budapest, Kaiserslautern, Speyer and Darmstadt.
He has done some American colonial, British and Scotch-Irish research on his granddaughters' colonial line, but is no expert in these areas. Such limited other American research as he has done has been ancillary to researching continental European records for clients with German-speaking ancestors.
What did he do when he wasn't a genealogist? Mental health administrator, Foreign Service officer, State Representative, political science and history professor in nine institutions (including military bases, a prison and a hospital), co-editor of the first college text on Minnesota government, unpaid citizen lobbyist who drafted the Minnesota Clean Indoor Air Act, organizational activist, speaker on public affairs topics, prize-winning lyrical poet and anthology editor, and a great diversity of temporary blue-collar and white-collar jobs. Born in southwest Kansas Dust Bowl in 1931 and grew up in Manitoba (1938-51). Worked in seven countries, lived in nine states and two Canadian provinces. Tumbling tumbleweed of Wandervolk stock. At 65 succumbed to the grave danger of living in the same house for ten years.
Ed started off as a farm boy who didn't speak any written language until almost eight, but soon discovered that the real world is that of books and dreams.
© 2005 Edward R. Brandt.
This site was last updated on
October 22, 2007
. Send questions or feedback about this site to erbgergen@att.net.
Earlier versions of this Web site were previously posted at http://pages.prodigy.net/brandtfam/geneal/
and http://home.cwix.com/~brandt@mci2000.com/edward.htm.