The confusion about how to find access to the Civil Vital Registers of
Hessen can easily be abolished. These Standesamtsregister begin in 1874,
are still in use and belong to the Federal State of Hessen. The older
copies, which are no longer subject to privacy laws, have been
transferred to a new central archive since 2011. It is part of the State
Archive of Marburg. At the beginning, shelves with a length of 1,500
meters were needed.

To make the documents accessible to the public in the easiest possible
way, the State of Hessen has come to an agreement with FamilySearch.
This institution digitizes the whole and steadily growing collection in
the new archive. Two identical copies are in the course of being published.

One copy is given to the State that publishes all of them on the joint
website of its archives. Until February 2015 its name was HADIS; since
then it is called Arcinsys. This website https://arcinsys.hessen.de is
accessible to everybody without any restrictions. There are two ways to
find the desired localities.

One was already mentioned by Roger Lustig. You first go to another
website with historical information about Hessen: LAGIS. With the
(English!) link http://www.lagis-hessen.de/en/subjects/index/sn/pstr you
are lead to the search function. The advantage of this indirect way via
LAGIS: you get an excellent survey of all the available places and years
to which you get with the next step.

The direct way is:
https://arcinsys.hessen.de/arcinsys/detailAction.action?detailid=v282839
Here you find the register for all places.

Another copy of the digital images becomes the property of FamilySearch.
They have their own, less favorable rules concerning the access which is
influenced by the fact that this firm plans to index all the entries.

Gerhard Buck, Idstein, Germany buckidstein@...