Books about the origins and meanings of surnames for the country of interest are a useful way to begin such a study. One useful book for German surnames, which summarizes the clues and hints in several German language sources, is Bruce Brandt and Edward Reimer Brandt’s Where to Look for Your Hard-to-find German-speaking Ancestors in Eastern Europe: Index to 19,720 Surnames in 13 Books, with Historical Background on Each Settlement, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Clearfield Co., 1993). Although focusing on Germans in Southeastern Europe, this volume shows what can be learned from a careful study of appropriate sources. Its approach could be duplicated by others for persons in non-German countries as well.

The concept of networking is certainly not new to genealogists; they have been using this kind of approach to their research for well over one hundred years. However, it is seldom taught, and even less seldom practiced when dealing with immigrant origins.

The principle behind networking is that someone else knows information of value to you, and in genealogy this is almost always the case. Others have researched parts of your ancestry before you, and all you have to do is locate these people. Close family members almost always have information about relatives which is not known to more distant researchers.

When considering immigrant origins, many foreign families know of relatives who left their old world home for North America. This is handed down in their families, much as stories of immigrant arrivals and their experiences are handed down in American families. The difficulty in applying this concept to immigrant origins research is in finding those families with such information.