Tracing ancestors

People from all over the world consult the archive when tracing their ancestors. Several great waves of emigration took numerous inhabitants of Mühlhausen to Britain, America and Australia. Their descendants now ask the archive for help in the search for their origins and more and more come in person even if they don't speak German. The city employs several English-speaking staff to help with enquiries. Sometimes the research leads to exciting discoveries such as finding the actual house where an ancestor used to live. From the beginning of the 19th century it is possible, by means of the city's address book collection, to find out exactly who inhabited every single house and what their trade was.

During the forty years under Socialist rule the people of East Germany tended to hang on to anything that might prove remotely useful, to make do and mend, to invent homemade solutions to problems which could not be solved by simply ordering new parts of equipment, as was possible in the Wirtschaftswunder prosperity of West Germany. The consequence of this economic situation has been that whole inventories, entire domestic interiors have been found almost undisturbed. Elderly citizens of Mühlhausen sometimes died leaving their homes intact with no relatives to divide their belongings, since they were beyond the border in West Germany. If they had been running a business, that too remained complete in its records, its somewhat antiquated machinery and tools, even much of its stock, such as that found in the premises of a brush-maker, or the priceless collection of photographs and negatives in the studio of a photographer who had recorded around eighty years of history in the city. When you consider how much of Germany's history went up in flames during World War II, not to mention earlier wars and incursions, you realise what this collection means for anyone trying to find out about Germany's past. We in Britain take it for granted that our records are preserved in the Public Record Offices. We can trace our own family history, look up the deeds of our property, and trace the development of our hometown merely by asking for the relevant documents. Wars and natural disasters have made little impact on our archives. Even Germany was beginning to believe its records were now safe from such threats until the great flood of summer 2002 hit the south and east of the country. Mühlhausen was lucky not to be affected, and because of this good luck it promptly set up a fund to assist the City of Meißen on the Elbe, where the archives had been waterlogged and needed instant action to freeze-dry and then restore them.

To enter the Imperial City Archive you go to the Renaissance wing of the Rathaus, which is full of the grandeur that went with the wealth and power of the city councillors, whose portraits surround the walls of the great Council Chamber. You descend past a heavy iron door down a steep flight of steps into the archive vaults and find yourself surrounded by solid dark wooden shelves and cupboards full of leather-bound volumes and boxes of manuscripts. Above them are whitewashed arches picked out in intricate blue-grey patterns, strange images of fruits and fabulous animals interwoven with the tendrils and foliage of fantastic climbing plants.