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No consensus to delete. Removed VfD notice and wikified. Deletion debate below.
Yeah, let's start listing registry offices (not districts as the article suggests) of places that don't have their own listing. And laundromats, internet cafés and post offices while we're at it! Delete. Pteron 04:49, 18 Apr 2004 (UTC)
* Delete. From what I can tell, it looks like Standesamts kind of equivalent to a zip code in the US--just a geographic division for purely administrative purposes, no content to it other than a label. Don't knock laundromats though...there's a great one in my hometown that's getting its own article some day. ; ) Postdlf 5:47 18 Apr 2004 (UTC)
- Delete. Standesamt is German for whatever the English word is, the article describes it as civil registration office, i.e. some official office where you can register being married, having given birth to a child, divorced, changed your name, ... -- till we *) 22:43, 19 Apr 2004 (UTC)
- Switch to keep, iff BWood is willing to write an article Standesamt explaining the 19th century prussian standesamt concept in comparison to the use as civil registry office today; and if BWood is linking the Standesamt Whatever articles with this. -- till we *) 21:17, 22 Apr 2004 (UTC)
- Keep. This is part of a structure that isn't fully developed yet. Standesamt is somewhat like "county seat" in the US. The structure is:
- Prussian province
- Admin district ("state")
- Kreis ("super county")
- Standesamt ("mini county")
- refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Province_of_Posen and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kreis_Rawitsch to see how this will all fit together. I haven't had time to formally create a WikiProject for this yet, but intend to. There are too many villages in each Kreise to deal with them at the Kreise level, so the Standesamt articles can list and discuss them in a managable manner. For example, refer to the Kreise page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kreis_Kolmar_in_Posen and look at the long list of villages in the fledgling table. Then see the stub article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standesamt_Kolmar. Maybe most people don't care about this level of detail, but there *is* an audience, primarily the thousands of genealogy researchers whose ancestors came from these villages. Bwood 04:09, 20 Apr 2004 (UTC)
::That's still not explaining what you can independently say about any particular Standesamt. List the Standesamts in each "Kreis" article perhaps, but especially if they are nothing more than a county seat-type designation, there is nothing you could say about them in and of themselves. Keep in mind also Wikipedia is not a geneological resource. Postdlf 5:22 20 Apr 2004 (UTC)
- What one can say about a Standesamt is the same as any other political jurisdiction. Standesm"ter had borders, it just wasn't an office and a desk, it was a subdivision of the Kreis, the lowest level in the Prussian state hierarchy. What might have led some down the wrong track, is the wording of the original stub. At this time and in this part of the world, areas are usually called by the name of the administrative seat. The most Prussian provinces used an area name, but in this case Posen is the name of the province, a Regierungsbezirk (admin district), a Kreis (like a county) (two actually, split into Posen West and Posen East), a Standesamt (like a mini-county or a secular parish) (two actually, one for the city only and one for the 'burbs) and a city which is the location for all the offices that administered all those levels of state government. So the Standesamt refers to both the office and the area that office administered. Granted, that the office itself, did not administer all the functions that the Kreis offices did, nor did Kreise offices administer all the functions that its Regierungsbezirk office did, etc. But it had an assigned area, often used for convenience by the higher levels of government for administering their functions in an organized manner. Census, voting, taxing, etc. all used the Standesamt divisions in their methodology.
- As for what you can say independantly about a Standesamt and it's district, please revisit the Standesamt Kolmar article. I've recently started adding some of the material that it was designed to contain, but I'd still consider it to be a stub. In this case, that includes the history, geography, industry, etc that is/was in communities that it administered.
- Since when is an encyclopedia not a geneological resource? And where is it written that WikiPedia is off limits for certain branches of knowledge? Encyclopedias are important resources for genealogists, used to understand the context in which their ancestors lived. I'm not proposing to post non-encyclopedic information, like volumes of family trees, for example. You seem to be saying that it's ok to go into excrutiating detail if the material is about science, but not geography. Even if someone wanted to go a step farther and take one of these little villages, and write an article about it, perhaps a history, describing when the churches were built, how the ownership passed from noble to noble to independance, when the Swedes killed half the people, and when it burned to ground twice, who cares? Just because *you* can't see the relevance, doesn't mean that it isn't relevant to others. Each village, even if it only contained four families at a time, was once home to ancestors of thousands of descendants. If one family left that village for America in 1880 (peak emigration), that family typically generated at least 2 to the fifth power current day descendant marriages, just in the US. And that's a conservative estimate, based on only two children of each marriage creating their own families. Between 1850 and 1920, millions of people emigrated from the Prussian eastern provinces to the US, Canada, Austrailia, etc. If someone wants to take the time to describe their ancestors home village in a structured, organized manner, why isn't WikiPedia an appropriate place? If it isn't, where would you send them? A mish-mosh of hit-or-miss genealogy websites? Bwood 14:34, 21 Apr 2004 (UTC)
It's simply untrue that Standesamt means mini county or anything even similar. The article you gave us, Bwood, about Standesamt Kolmar actually says what it means. It is a civil registry office, necessary to register marriages, civil unions, births, deaths etc. It is not an administrative category below Kreis - and it wasn't in Prussia either. What on earth could be smaller than a Kreis anyway? Please, trust the German speaker (me) here...Pteron 21:40, 20 Apr 2004 (UTC)
- As someone who has spent years studying *eastern* Prussian province history and geography, trust me when I respectfully ask you to not apply 21st century German concepts to 19th century Prussian provinces in Polish areas. In the 1850s, people walked miles to church every week. The Standesamt's admin district was a "secular parish" often, but not all that often, corresponding roughly to the local Catholic and/or Protest parish borders. Each little area was world to itself, some village were predominantly German, some Polish. No real cities, very few large towns. While the Standesamt was itself an office, it also defined a group of a little more than a dozen villages. So, sorry, but you are 100% wrong when you say that it wasn't an administrative category below Kreis, and also 100% wrong when you say it wasn't in Prussia either (no matter what cryptic meaning one could read into that, since the obvious meaning is so patently wrong). I'll repeat it again, the Prussian system was divided like this: Kingdom>province>Regierungsbezirk>Kreise>Standesamt district. Below that, each Standesamt district contained communities that could classed in various ways (estates, villages, towns is the simplest). Further, more than half the communities actually belonged to other communities. So when you step down from the state (Prussia) jurisdictional structure, you get to the municipal governmental hierarchy. Bwood 14:34, 21 Apr 2004 (UTC)
- Do you see how long that list of villages in the Kreis (Kolmar) article is? How can we discuss these villages in any detail within the Kreis page? I have to disagree with you about the Standesamt not being an administrative unit. Try registering in one that doesn't have jurisdiction of your village. The hierarchy was: Kingdom>Provinz>Regierungbezirk>Kreis>Standesamt>community>other communities owned by the first community.
- I believe your difficulty is that you haven't seen enough of the "master plan", since I haven't worked on the Standesa"mter entries very much, the province and Kreise articles have been a higher priority. But if there is a WikiPedia rule that limits the amount of detail that we can go into, even if properly organized into a logical heirarchy, then tell me now and I'll stop wasting my time here and go back to putting it on my genealogy-only website. If there isn't such a rule, will formalizing it as a Project safeguard it? Bwood 00:38, 21 Apr 2004 (UTC)
I've looked at Standesamt Kolmar and I don't understand why these should be deleted. It looks like Bwood is willing to put a lot of effort into something that, while somewhat obscure, looks like useful historical information. I think this is better than say, the census-data-generated entry for every 1 horse town in the US. Maximus Rex 04:13, 21 Apr 2004 (UTC)
- Keep. I'm changing my vote after the above discussion and seeing what's been done with the article. Postdlf 15:09 21 Apr 2004 (UTC)
- Keep Bensaccount 04:01, 22 Apr 2004 (UTC)
- Fair enough, I'm convinced - perhaps someone with that level of expertise could be pursuaded to write an article on the Standesamt in Prussia and explain differences to the current usage. That way this type of argument could be avoided. To start off with subpages of a topic group makes it very difficult to gain an overview... Pteron 05:58, 23 Apr 2004 (UTC)
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