Welcome to my website!

Here I share my experiences and the tools I use to research the history of my family. Genealogy is more than just a hobby for me - it is a journey into the past that helps me discover the stories and secrets of my ancestors.

The most important sources include church records, records from registry offices and archives as well as online platforms such as Ancestry, MyHeritage, FamilySearch and WikiTree. These resources are treasure troves of information that help me put the pieces of my family history puzzle together. Parish registers and civil records often provide detailed insights into births, marriages and deaths, while archives sometimes hold surprising documents and stories. In the case of the Tibke family, the book ‘Klethen seit 1157’ (published by Dirk Kossenjans in 2006) is particularly worthy of mention. This book is a chronicle of the village of Klethen (article on Wikipedia) near Ahlerstedt in the district of Stade and contains a lot of interesting and useful information and data on the history of the village and also on many members of the Tibke family (more on this in an article to be published soon). I don't know exactly where the name originated, but according to my research so far, many ancestors of the Tibkes (and other similar spellings) came from Klethen and the surrounding area.

I have used Ancestry and RootsMagic to manage my family tree. Both programs offer great features for organising and visualising the data you collect. However, I recently switched to the open source and free software 'Gramps' (Genealogical Research and Analysis Management Programming System, Gramps - Free Genealogy Software) because it is also available in German. As most of my ancestors come from Germany, this was the most sensible choice for me. Gramps has many useful features, which can be easily extended using plugins. It is also 'open source' and free, and is constantly being developed. It also has good import/export interfaces, so you can easily convert the data to other formats for use in other tools. On this website I will tell you more about Gramps and how it helps me to make my genealogical research even more efficient.

I hope you will find useful information and inspiration for your own genealogical research here (and more soon). Have fun browsing and researching.