Ancestry is the world's largest online platform for genealogical research and provides digital access to historical documents and assistance in family tree creation. By indexing archival holdings, collections from all over the world can be searched online for names. Among other things, Ancestry databases contain birth, death and marriage certificates, passenger/immigration and emigration lists, church records, casualty lists and military registers as well as historical telephone and address books. At our media stations you can access content on your relatives for free that would otherwise incur a charge. You can also have the information you find during your research sent directly to your email address.

Archion is a joint project of the Protestant Church in Germany (EKD) and the majority of the Protestant regional churches. The participating archives are digitising their historical sources and presenting them via a joint portal. You can access this content at our media stations. Together with Archion, we thus offer you the opportunity to browse through old church records and search for information on your relatives.

The Federal Archives have the legal mandate to secure documents from German state institutions and to make them accessible. At the Bayreuth site, the Federal Archives hold unique files and documents closely related to the expulsion of Germans from the Prussian provinces east of the Oder and Neisse rivers, from Eastern, Central and South-Eastern Europe. We offer you access to the research database of the Federal Archives Invenio. If you have found what you are looking for during the free and unrestricted research at our media stations, you can continue your research at the Federal Archives in Bayreuth, where you can inspect the selected files in the on-site reading room.

Since autumn 2021, the new online portal Copernico has been providing information about the work of a growing number of research institutions, museums, libraries and cultural departments that deal with the history and cultural heritage of Eastern Europe. Online offers, projects, exhibitions, funding programmes, collections, publications and event series can be systematically searched in a research database. At the same time, a thematic magazine provides information with exciting contributions, background articles, interviews or multimedia reports on selected thematic focal points. At our media stations, you can browse through exciting articles that you might otherwise have missed, free of charge.