Tracing your Kieffer ancestors: a genealogy guide

Kieffer families are usually well documented. Alsace, Moselle and Luxembourg have kept their parish and civil registers for centuries, and much of this material is now online for free. This guide shows where to start and what to watch out for.

Start with what you know

Work backwards, one generation at a time. Collect names, dates and places from relatives, family papers, death notices and gravestones. A single precise place of birth, such as a village rather than “Alsace”, will save you hours in the archives.

Search every spelling

Clerks wrote names as they heard them, and the language of the records changed with the country. Search for all the forms of the name:

Kieffer and Kiefer, the most common forms;
Küffer, Küfer and Kuefer, the standard German forms with and without the umlaut;
Kiffer, a rarer Alsatian form;
in Latin parish registers, first names in Latin: Joannes for Jean or Johann, Nicolaus for Nicolas or Niklaus.

The article on the origin of the name explains why these spellings all belong together.

Mind the borders

Alsace and much of Lorraine changed hands several times. They were annexed by Germany from 1871 to 1918 and occupied again during the Second World War. For 1871–1918, records from Moselle and Alsace are kept in German, under German law. Your ancestors may have changed nationality without ever moving house.

France: Bas-Rhin and Moselle

Archives of Bas-Rhin (northern Alsace): Catholic and Protestant parish registers from the sixteenth to the late eighteenth century, and civil registers of births, marriages and deaths from 1793, are digitised and can be viewed online for private use.
Archives of Moselle: parish registers are online for the communes that lent them for digitisation. Civil registers from the Revolution to 1871 are online for every commune, and later years have been added in stages. The city of Metz publishes its own civil registers from 1793 to the early twentieth century.
For Haut-Rhin and Meurthe-et-Moselle, use the departmental archives of each. Parish registers of the former Briey district, once part of Moselle, are published by the archives of Meurthe-et-Moselle.

Luxembourg

Matricula publishes the parish registers held by the Diocesan Archives of Luxembourg. They are free to browse online.
The National Archives of Luxembourg (ANLux) hold civil and state records and can guide you to other sources.

Germany

Records are kept region by region. Catholic parish registers for many German dioceses are also on Matricula. Protestant church books are often available through the archives of each regional church.

Collaborative databases

Large genealogy platforms such as Geneanet and FamilySearch hold millions of family trees and indexed records. They are excellent for finding leads. Always check a lead against the original register before adding it to your tree: copied trees often repeat each other’s mistakes.

Before you buy a “family history”

Be wary of products that promise “the history of the Kieffer family” or “the Kieffer coat of arms”. As the article on the origin of the name explains, there is no coat of arms for a surname, and many unrelated families share the Kieffer name. Your family’s real history is in the registers.