Archion.de Citation Cryptology Revealed

If you are checking out my AncesTree (that is my nickname for my Ancestry.com tree called Rödiger Family) and are looking at records from Germany, you undoubtably will stumble across descriptions of birth, baptism, marriage, death and sometimes confirmation records which will usually look something like: "Kassel, Hersfeld, Niederaula, KB 1720-1754 (Trau), B. 2367, S. 60, N. 17520224".
It may appear strange to you and even a bit like code, but in reality it is my citation of the source of the information found in the record.
The explanation given below is lengthy and may seem like way to much information. But I have two groups in mind on this page. The first is the group that is just curious to know what all the letters and numbers mean. The second is the group who may one day try to pick up where I leave off. So, with that in mind I have been very detailed in my explanation. If you are in the first group, which I assume is most readers, don't be daunted by the length of this page. Just skim over it and get the general idea.

In this case, this citation belongs to the marriage of my 6G grandparents, Philipp Dietz and Anna Barbara Weißmüller. Below is a screenshot of Philip Dietz's page on ancestry.com. You can see from this that his marriage to Anna Barbara Weißmüller took place on 24 Feb 1752 and in the description field I have noted that my source for this was "Kassel, Hersfeld, Niederaula, KB 1720-1754 (Trau), B. 2367, S. 60, N. 17520224"

Under the Marriage information is the description mentioned above

Anytime you see a notation like this in the description field, it refers to a third party source called Archion.com. For this example, I have made a screenshot of the source document:

Above the digital image (above) is a line of text in blue with words or phrases separated by the ">" symbol. On the extreme right is a particular church book (Kirchenbuch), "KB 1720-1754". To the left of this is the particular church that kept this church book, designated by the name of the town or village that kept the record, ie. "Niederaula". To the left of this is the district in which this church was located, ie. Hersfeld, which is located in a larger geographical area known as Kurhessen-Waldeck which has an Archive of Lutheran Church Records in Kassel. So I have shortened the name of the Archive down to just the one word in my citation, "Kassel". There are about 22 Lutheran Church Archives scattered strategically around Germany, each with dozens of districts which in turn have many individual churches.Within each church are usually several different church books.

Here is how the list looks in Niederaula:

Niederaula has 12 church books. The first five which cover the years from 1654-1830 each have sections within 1) Birth/Baptism (Tauf); 2) Confirmation (Konf); 3) Marriage (Trau); and 4) Death/Burial (Tote).
In most of the "KB" books the pages are numbered by section. So Baptisms start with page 1, but so does the death section. So, for these church books, I have had to add a designator after the name of the church book as in my example above "KB 1720-1754 (Trau)". The parenthesis is a recent change, so many of my citations still look like "KB 1720-1754, Trau". Hopefully I will get all of that corrected and uniform eventually.

As an aside, I began using the German terms in my citations long before I knew I was going to add this information to my public tree, so please forgive me for making you work a little harder to figure out the difference between Trau, Tauf and Tote.

After 1830, to the best of my knowledge all of the Lutheran Churches in Germany began to use separate books for each life event. And thankfully indexes are almost universally included in each book after 1830. Before 1830, I count myself lucky if I find that some enterprising church recorder made the effort to index all of the records.

So far I have explained just the first half of the citations. And as you can see I have replaced the ">" symbol with commas in my citations.
The second half is in blue in the example below.
"Kassel, Hersfeld, Niederaula, KB 1720-1754 (Trau), B. 2367, S. 60, N. 17520224"
For the designators "B", "S" and "N" to make sense, you need to learn the German words for "image" (Bild), "page" (Seite) and "number" (Nummer). I apologize once more for inflicting you with German terminology.

"B" is easy to explain as each church book has been assigned image numbers by the digitizers (see the left side of the image above where there are thumbnails of each image to choose from).

When the pages have been numbered by some thoughtful recorder, as in this case, the page number follows the "S" designator. So, in this example we are looking at page 60 in the marriage portion of "Church Book 1720-1754". Unfortunately, not all books are numbered.
Here is an example of an unnumbered page of burial records:

Kassel, Hersfeld, Niederaula, KB 1816-1830 (Tote), B. 241, S. 18170105, N. 18170214

This is the first entry on an unnumbered page from the death and burial section of an 1816-1830 church book. Because there is no page number, I have had to become a little creative. As much as is possible I use the date from the first record on the page, which in this case is January 5, 1817 and because of an old habit I picked up when doing spreadsheets (YearMonthDay), the page number becomes 18170105 (the 01 for January and the 05 for the 5th.

To point to the exact record on the page, it would be nice if they had numbered each record. After 1830 numbers were assigned to almost all records. Here is an example from an 1840 baptismal record in Tann:

In this example each record has its own number in the far left column. When that number is available, that is the number that follows the "N" designator in my citations.

In the case of the previous example, I follow the same course of action for the "N" designator as I do for the page number. I use the date of the individual record. So, in the previous example, the first record would have identical "S" and "N" numbers. But because the second record shows a burial which took place on February 14th of 1817, the "N" designator would be 18170214. To complicate things more, sometimes more than one baptism, marriage or burial took place on the same day. To keep each citation unique, I have further refined this numbering system by adding "-01" and "-02" etc. to the "N" designator.
In this example, if there were three baptisms on 14 February 1817 and the one being cited is the second one listed, I would cite it as "N. 18170214-02".

So, if you understand how the records are nested on Archion.de and learn the meaning of just a few German words, you will understand the meaning of my citations. And, should you ever decide to subscribe to Archion.de, you will be able to easily find the records that I have labored to locate.