How should I research a German link in my tree?

Q I would like to find out more about the wife of my great great uncle, Henry Turner; he died in 1901. She was named Bertha Clara Helene Menke, and married Henry in London in 1877. Her father was described as a gentleman called Emil Julius Hermann Menke, and she was born in Küstrin in Brandenburg, north Germany.

Anne Marley

A I could find little in the British records besides the marriage and the deaths of Henry and Bertha. She was born in about 1850, and they do not appear in the British census between 1881 and 1911. Is it possible that they lived overseas?

Küstrin was a city in Brandenburg and a German railway hub. It was largely destroyed in the Second World War and most of it was subsequently east of the Oder–Neisse line in the new Poland. Any remaining German inhabitants were removed and replaced with Polish refugees displaced from the East. It is now called Kostrzyn nad Odra. The former suburbs on the west bank of the Oder are now Küstrin-Kietz in Germany.

On Ancestry ( ancestry.co.uk), the Newhall_Stansfield Family Tree has a Maria, a daughter of Emil Julius Hermann and Amalie Lisette Menke. She was born on 1 June 1843 in Küstrin and married Alfred Augustus Newhall, a US missionary, in Secunderabad, India. The family now lives in the USA. There is also another daughter: Emmy Elise Berta, born on 3 November 1837 in Küstrin, in another Ancestry tree, the Ball Family Tree. This shows the descent through her to a Swiss family.

Also on Ancestry are German marriage certificates for two of Bertha’s other siblings. Flora Bertha, born on 6 June 1851 in Cüstrin, married twice at Stettin – on 24 November 1891 to Anton Kauenhowen, and on 18 October 1910 to Herman Gustav Adolf Liebig – while Karl Hugo Richard, born on 8 January 1853, married Agnes Maria Schâfer in Berlin on 10 April 1883. There may be other children. I suggest you contact the owners of the Ancestry trees, who may have other records. Peter Towey