Sometimes there's so many people on the site I've had to enter my search word twice.
On home page if there's no place to enter your search criteria (surname, etc) look on the left -
1)you are looking to click on Allgemein Recherche which is under the word 'suche'
2) Enter name in space provided
3) look on righthand side CLICK on "Auswandersuche"
4) If the next page does NOT have a list of state ARCHIVs enter your search word again on this new page and click WEITER which will bring up the page containing the list of archives. There are a handful of archives (about6 or 7)
5) directly under the archive list on the right is SUCHEN - click on 'Suchen'
YOU HAVE ARRIVED AT THE RESULTS PAGE
6) This next page will have every item that each archive has on your subject and each item is given an archive reference number "Bestellnumber". On the right of each number is a short outline of what the document is.
You need to look out that you don't miss other documents - so scroll to the bottom of the webpage to see what this page consists of: sometimes under each section is Page 1 of 104 ("Seite 1 of 104") and you should click on the arrow > to bring up the next page of that section.
To give you an idea: My family is from the state of Hannover the prefix is "HANN74" and the family lived in the Liebenburg area therefore the ref would be "HANN 74 Liebenburg --- " I do look at other references because the port of departure would have an embarkation record. If the family had secretly absconded other authorities would have a record of them.
Hope this helps
Rena
Moderator Comment: Update May 2017:
The site has changed since Rena's original entry. Here are her new instructions Here's the Home page link where it gives instructions of what's available if you use the site if you're unregistered and what extra is available if you register:-
https://www.arcinsys.niedersachsen.de/arcinsys/start.action?oldNodeid=Step 1) on the upper tags, click on "Search", then on the drop down box click on "Simple Search"
.....which will bring you to this page:-
https://www.arcinsys.niedersachsen.de/arcinsys/einfachesuche.actionStep 2)
Enter your surname of interest
Click on "All Archives"
Click on "Search"
Step 3) The Results Page has a blue band part way across it which has the number of "hits" you have received together with the number of web pages.
and on the left of the page is a list of all the archives. Here's a translation of the archive list:-
Provincial Archives
county archives
city Archive
municipal archives
Parliament and party archives
Church archives
University and university archives
economy Archive
Domicile, house and family archives
media archive
Other archives