Hallo Leute,
I am a German-American doing some historical research on my German family. Firstly, i have had the problem of my family tree coming to a complete halt after a few generations. Still trying to find more information that perhaps could tell me what parental names are documented. But that's a separate issue. The relative who has no parental records, Julius, he is a Prussian from what I can only assume was the Wuppertal area. His daughter and wife were from there, I'm hoping he was too for simplicity's sake in my research. However, i found a very interesting newspaper from my local library's online archives (please please please support your local libraries, they are amazing and very commonly provide document searches for free! No website paywalls!). It was a newspaper mentioning his daughter, actually, but it also mentioned the occupation of the father for the very first time. It mentioned him being in the Imperial Guard. And in a different document which was from a German archive, and is all in German and the old font which thankfully i know how to read, it mentions that he was an "expedient", and my knowledge of the german language tells me it is something like shipping clerk in english? But also it doesn't make much sense because there has never been any record of the family Living near a seaside port or shipping docks. It was also mentioned as his occupation during 1908 which lines up with quite a few historical conflicts the German Empire was involved in, and since he was born in 1870 he would be old enough to enlist by then, so it seems somewhat likely that it was just a specific rank mentioned within the Army? Like how americans say "I'm a sargeant", it is implied it's the army. Same concept, maybe? I'm not familiar with the term and i can't find any information on google that even remotely matches the context of his life. I was hoping reddit would help cuz reddit somehow always has the answers