In December 2015, I made a significant breakthrough with Lt. Col. William Edward Hinchley Cooke, receiving his birth registration from the archives in Dresden. While searching on Ancestry for his mother’s relations, I realized that a whole swath of new indexed German records had become available on Ancestry. Not only for Dresden, but also for Berlin.
After happily discovering numerous family records from the early 1920s, I turned my attention to peripheral research.
Could I find the death registration for Clara Bauerle? My initial excitement turned to disappointment when I realized that the newly released records for Berlin only covered the period from 1874 to 1920. My research has suggested that Clara passed away in Berlin in December 1941, a full 21 years after the most recent window into the past.
On the other hand, I did notice that several German cities (Hamburg, Mannheim, Mainz, Dresden) had death records that extended far as 1950 and 1952. So, once again, there is hope for more recent records and a break in the case.
N.B. See my more recent blog post about finding Clara’s death registration.