Research in East Prussia

Hi Linny,

if you use the GOV-Interface from this website searching for "Wangnicken", you unluckily get 6 different East Prussian locations with this name (some of them nowadays not existing anymore). Thus, to find out which of those places could be the right one would be the first step. Anyway, even if you know the right place, further search for your family member will be very difficult (not to say impossible) if you have something like online access to digitized parish registers in your mind. The simple reason: there is almost nothing online from East Prussia, especially not from the part which today belogs to Russia (Oblast Kaliningrad) ... unfortunately!

Regards
Uwe

Well Linny,

then this must be your place. It is not existing anymore, but the links to the map services on the right side of the website show where this place once used to be. Wangnicken was not a municipality but a "Vorwerk" (sort of farm) and belonged to the parish of Lichtenhagen. On this old German map (access via http://igrek.amzp.pl/mapindex.php?cat=TK25 ) Wangnicken is still drawn in (lower edge of the map, appr. 4 km west from Lichtenhagen, grid square 7459-6052).

And here is a compilation of the parish registers from Lichtenhagen. As you can see, familysearch (LDS) has also films covering 1718-1945. Finally, there ist the pretty new German online portal Archion (https://www.archion.de) which offers liable for costs online access to some of the parish registers from Lichtenhagen . Archion is still extending its range, so in future more parish registers from Lichtenhagen might be available online.

One remark to the "transformation" of the family name as described by you: as I assume, August H. Altroggen was an immigrant to the US. And I think transformations like this one were nothing uncommon when foreign names were soundig a bit too difficulty for English ears and mother tongues.

Regards
Uwe