[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] My favorite gazetteers

[albertmuth at aol.com]

Knowing which gazetteer to use depends on the problem. Learn about what a gazetteer is and its world history at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gazetteer
 
Records are not centralized for any area where our German-speaking ancestors lived. I am unaware of any “complete” gazetteer that lists every single village in Central and Eastern Europe where someone who spoke German lived.
 
You may have heard of Meyers Orts.  To find a quick explanation to offer to you, I went to www.ask.com where I typed:  What is Meyers Orts? in the “search for box”.
 
One of the links was to www.ancestry.com , where it says:
          This database contains Meyers Geographical and Commercial Gazetteer of the German Empire (or Meyers Orts- und Verkehrs-Lexikon des Deutschen Reichs in German). This gazetteer of the German Empire is the gazetteer to use to locate place names in German research. It was originally compiled in 1912. This gazetteer is the gazetteer to use because it includes all areas that were part of the pre-World War I (WWI) German Empire. Gazetteers published after WWI may not include parts of the Empire that were lost to bordering countries. Overall, this gazetteer includes more than 210,000 cities, towns, hamlets, villages, etc. 
 
I disagree with the author’s emphasis that Meyers Orts is the best gazetteer to “locate place names in German research”.  Meyers Orts includes only place-names in the German Empire.  Ethnic Germans also lived in Central Poland, Volhynia, Bessarabia, Volga Region, Romania, former Yugoslavia, et cetera.  If you are interested in pre-1945 GERMANY (German Empire, Prussia, etc.), then take a look at
https://wiki.familysearch.org/en/Germany_Gazetteers .  
 
A partial substitute for Meyers-Orts (place-names in the German Empire), online, is at 
http://www.gemeindeverzeichnis.de/gem1900/gem1900.htm?gem1900_2.htm  It does not tell which parish (Ev or Cath) that a village would use. To see the complete list of places in alphabetical order, search mid-page for
 Zum alphabetischen Verzeichnis aller Gemeinden geht es   hier.
 
 
People with German-speaking countries came from many different countries, such as those I just mentioned.  If you really do not have any idea about the general location of the village name from where your family originated (“Grandpa spoke German”), then, I repeat, there is no COMPLETE gazetteer for you to consult, whether filmed by LDS (available either already on site on permanent loan site at a Family History Center or orderable from Salt Lake City) or on the Internet, that can help you.  
 
Misspellings happen all the time in any language.  When speakers move from one country to a different one where the official language is another, then the problems start mounting.  My German speaking ancestors lived in Poland in villages with Polish names for over 100 years.  They came to English-speaking North America and mixed with Germans who had come from other areas.  Was the spelling of the place-names distorted because they could not speak English or because the person writing down the place-name could not understand how a German was pronouncing Polish?  In which language was the person trying to write phonetically?
 
On this mailing list are several members who are very good at figuring out what a place name might be, how it should be spelled, and even are able to locate it on a map and provide its coordinates.  It helps to have a DATE, some specific SURNAMES, and even the point of final destination in the New World.
 
Sometimes, someone knowing the combination of these factors will see right away what the misspelled village must be.
 
We often rely on Shtetlseeker at http://www.jewishgen.org/Communities/LocTown.asp, which relies on a modified Soundex system to see whether the computer will recognize something that we do not.  You should know that the spellings of towns now in the Ukraine use an English language transliteration of Ukrainian (not German, not Polish, not Russian), a language that did not become official until 1991.
 
Those who have research knowledge of German and Polish and English sounds and spellings may draw on experience to come up with solutions.
 
We often ask someone to send us a scan of a document to our private email address, if that is possible.  You may have misread the record yourself.  An indexer of a database online may have misread it.  Trust me, misreading documents happens often, and we are ALL guilty of doing this at some time.
 
Sadly, we are often dealing with Grandma’s approximate spelling. Eighty years after immigration, my dad’s eldest sister said that their father often spoke of Sessoline. I now know that he was referring to the place where his Baptist church was:  Zezulin, near Lublin.
 
For determining the parish or civil record office where to search for your ancestors, the current administrative divisions of place-names are not, I repeat, NOT useful because the standard reference sources do not include parish affiliations THAT NO LONGER EXIST.  I doubt there are enough ethnic Germans left in the places where OUR ancestors lived to justify the existence of a Lutheran or a Baptist church. No modern gazetteer of Poland or Ukraine would list any Lutheran or Baptist parishes for our villages because few Germans remained behind after 1945.  
 
 
 
There are several gazetteers that I like using.
 
Polish place-names in the LDS library catalog is based on SPIS or Spis miejscowości Polskiej Rzeczypospolitej Ludowej.  Currently, this is available on LDS microfiche 6000369 – 6000383 or microfilm 2037058 Item 2.  The LDS library catalog is NOT a gazetteer.  It only lists places of record:  towns that had a church or where the civil registration office was located. 
 
 
To determine WHICH Catholic parish to look at in early 19th records, I use several sources:
 
1.  The old 19th century gazetteer. http://dir.icm.edu.pl/pl/Slownik_geograficzny/   Instructions for using it may be found at 
http://www.halgal.com/slownik.html
 
To use it, you must be able to type Polish spellings (which SGGEE does not use currently).  You can use a virtual Polish keyboard at http://www.5goldig.de/Polnische_Tastatur/polnisch_keyboard.html.   Notice the top keyboard has lower case letters; the bottom keyboard has Upper case.  Some diacritically marked characters are located on the bottom keyboard. 
 
2.  The 1934 gazetteer, because it tells me in the right-hand column of the page.  On LDS film 1343868, it is the Skorowidz miejscowości rzeczypospolitej polskiej or, “Index of Places of the Republic of Poland”.  It does not include the Western 1/3 of today’s Poland, but DOES include Polish Volhynia.  It is now available online at the Digital Library of Wielkopolska
http://www.wbc.poznan.pl/dlibra/docmetadata?id=12786  You can even download it!  I will try to make my downloaded file work this evening. To learn how to use it, see http://www.halgal.com/skorowidz.html
 
 
Since the ancestors of German speakers came, at some point, from a land that was administratively under German rule (even a child knows that “Germans come from Germany”), I also try to be familiar with gazetteers that will tell me parish names.
 
I like the Gemeindelexikon für das Königreich Preussen (Gazetteer for the Kingdom of Prussia), originally published in 13 volumes right before 1910.  Place-names are based on those on the 1905 census.  It’s written in Fraktur (about which, see 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraktur_(script), ; information is arranged in columns.  There are multiple filmings.  If you have a subscription to ancestry.com you can use it there.
 
For Ostpreussen and Westpreussen, I use http://www.progenealogists.com/germany/prussia/index.html
For Pommern LDS film 806634 item 4
For Posen LDS film 806634 item 5
For Schlesien LDS film 806633 item 2
 
I particularly like using The Latin Church in the Polish Commonwealth in 1772: A Map and Index of Localities by Stanislaw Litak, which has great maps by Zofia Zuchowska. If, for some reason, my gazetteer fails me (usually because the parish had changed by the time that the gazetteer was published), then this is my GO TO book.  I can use this book to see what the surrounding parishes were, then go to the LDS library catalog to see whether records have been filmed.  This book is still available, for a modest price, from a number of places like www.amazon.com 
http://www.pgsa.org/store/cart.php?target=product&product_id=259&category_id=57 and probably many other places
 
 
You can also learn at http://www.progenealogists.com/germangazetteersonline.htm, where gazetteers for a few other regions are also found.
 
 
When all else fails, ask members of this mailing list!
 
Al Muth
30 Apr 2010