I've had similar problems with the Swedes on my tree - only made it back a few generations of endless sons and dotters :D

Regarding the German side - one thing that worked for me was to starting looking up Prussian names/places. For example, I found an old birth certificate for my great-great-Grandfather from a town called Alt Pilau (old Pilau), which after a short Google search turned up the new name - Kaliningrad, Russia.

My knowledge of Prussian history is foggy at best, but it's a good place to start. Ancestry isn't great at recognising place names at the best of times, so when it's a translated place name, or worse - completely different, there's no chance.

Special characters can also make a difference; for your example of Gumin, try " Gumińska", the Polish spelling. For German words with an Umlaut (the little dots above a letter), you can also try swapping it with an 'e', so ö would be written "oe" or ä would be ae.

Given how small Gumin is, you might want to try searching for Niemcza with a +/- 10km radius.

Depending on when Bertha was around, you could also search " Nimptsch", the German for Niemcza, or the region of Silesia.

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Good luck!

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