One great source for genealogy however is the Church of the Latter Day Saints. They have well funded teams that research genealogy non stop. [1] I would just visit a local church and see if they can assist.
[1] - https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Latter-day_Saint_Online...
Unfortunately, as I've discovered myself, it is NOT true that everything is digitized. If it even is, it might just be the images (not OCR'ed).
I found my own family in the 1950 US census (just released), and I did it by knowing what street they lived on, and searching about 40 handwritten records from their "Enumeration District" until I found that street. And that's relatively recent, and it's in English.
But maybe you'll be lucky. Good luck.
As others have mentioned, (1) http://familysearch.com is excellent, incredibly good for being free, and (2) http://ancestry.com is also extremely useful. Yes the latter is paid and expensive, unfortunately. There is a significant degree of overlap between the two, but both tend to have some resources indexed (or indexed slightly differently) that the other does not. It will be difficult to do a serious search without using both to complement each other.
German records are fairly good from about the early 1800’s through the early 1900’s right up to the world wars. The wars mucked with things and for obvious reasons you will find families migrating to escape poverty, war, death, etc.
Some random tips:
* Remember that borders are not static. Name of places and even countries change over time and this was especially true of Germany during this time period. An invaluable tool to help disambiguate this is the Meyer’s Gazetter http://meyersgaz.org/
* Trace to at least 3 generations and 3rd cousins of your known connections, and look at the other trees connected to those individuals on ancestry.com. While user created trees are sometimes sloppy and should be taken with several grains of salt, it is often the case that someone else in the wider family already knows or has researched something, and it can be a good place to start pulling at threads before starting from scratch.
* Spelling of names can change through the years and across migrations. Learn to think phonetically and assume transcription errors happen frequently, both of the records and in the creation of the records themselves.
* Birthdates are just as bad as name transcriptions, finding matching records at +/- 2 years is relatively common, I usually search a person at +/- 5 years when starting out. This is especially true with adoptions, unfortunately.
* Because of the previous, family group matches (ages/gender) are at least as important as exact name matches. Ex a family with a vaguely similar family name, but dad, mom, and 7 children of the right age/gender, might be a match.
* For most of the older records there may be no census or similar. In this case it can be relatively same to assume groups of children clustered in the same place, with the same parent names, are probably in the same family. (Especially true when the parents marriage and all the baptisms are at the same church)
The monthly subscription carries no commitment and you don’t lose data when not subscribed. So don’t think of it as “$xx per month commitment is so expensive!” But instead as “I’d happily pay $20 this month to support the research I want to do. Next month, we’ll see.” I’ve subscribed / stopped / resubscribed several times over the years as the time I have ebbs and flows.
DNA + genealogy is the only way to be certain of things.
It's also fun to learn the history of the area in which you live. I've found it interesting to see the fairly large amount of history from the people who lived in this house in its 96 year history.
* One world tree where each person only appears once and all users contribute to collect as much details (usually with supporting documents) as possible for each person in the tree. Some genealogists hate these as they either don't want to share their (often costly) research with everyone for free or they had bad experiences with some users changing seemingly correct details to something else without providing proof.
* Several user-specific trees where each user has his own tree and can share it with selected other users or not. This also means that you might miss some details someone else found out about your tree's people. Those websites usually want a member fee for you to be able to see other user's trees and merge details from them.
These are the sites I know of:
* MyHeritage (user-specific trees) - very well known in Europe due to their excessive TV marketing, basically the gateway drug to genealogy here. But also lots of users that only tried it out once and thus have a very small tree only going back 1 or 2 generations. MyHeritage also matches your data with historic records and trees from other websites but wants to see money for you to manage those matches or copy details from other users' trees.
* Ancestry (user-specific trees) - never tried that one but I've heard they have one of the largest collection of scanned (by them) and indexed historic records and are a big preference amongst genealogists.
* FamilyTree (user-specific trees) - never tried that one
* FamilySearch (one-world tree) - see the other comments - it's a great resource and they even have an API (e.g. Synium's MacFamilyTree/MobileFamilyTree can sync data with FamilySearch). And it's free.
* WikiTree (one-world tree) - this free site "only" lets you build your tree but doesn't provide any own historic records. However, since users are encouraged to upload their records/proof and link those to their ancestors, you often find something. WikiTree also regularly has "competitions" where users are supposed to fill in details and climb to the top of the roster. Compared to all other sites the "Wiki" in "WikiTree" means that - apart from basic details like name and DOB/DOD - there's only a huge text field where you're supposed to add details in text form - like on a wiki page. If you use FamilySearch AND WikiTree, You can link your WikiTree data to FamilySearch and vice versa so it's clear those are the same person. The records also are publicly visible and appear on Google. Due to this I've been contacted by a few relatives I never knew about.
So for your research - apart from searching FamilySearch or visiting one of their research centres - I'd also suggest making free accounts at e.g. MyHeritage and/or Ancestry and add all the things you know, then wait whether a match pops up. If you're unsure about a date, make sure to set it to "Estimated" or "About" so the matching engine doesn't try to find an exact match.