[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Revised Gazetteers and a revised Location Guideline

[Frank Stewner]

Dear list,

since Saturday you find on the research folder six revised Gazetteers. Three Gazetteers include all known villages inhabited at one time by Germans (Poland, Volhynia and Galicia). Three Gazetteers (German-, Austrian- and Russian Empire without the above mentioned) contain only few villages as examples based mostly on locations mentioned in the MPD. I advise the use of the “search place” on the homepage with Firefox as only that browser works!.

 

After that upload I had to change the Location-Guideline on page 36 and the Volhynian Gazetteer and I want to tell you the story why:

 

Whenever a member sends his personal genealogical file to SGGEE for inclusion into the MPD, Gary Warner sends it first to Ed Koeppen in Australia for correction/standardisation concerning Names and North-American locations. And then the file comes to me for corrections of locations in the rest of the world. I use the locations guideline we have produced together and which is downloadable here: http://www.sggee.org/research/village_guidelines_detailed.pdf

This procedure happened also with the file of the new member Waldemar Wolff of Berlin. In Waldemar’s file were a few locations of Volhynia. He was born 1935 in that part of Volhynia, which stayed Russian after WW I. Many of his locations are in Russia and Kyrgyzstan as he and his family had to  move to the east during or before WWII. I could add many new locations to the Russian Empire Gazetteer. 

Waldemar is in Germany called a “Spätaussiedler”, my dictionary says “German emigrant who returned to Germany long after the end of World War II”. Waldemar speaks and writes Russian much better then German. Thus he is the ideal man helping me with Russian locations and writing. I started corresponding with him trying to locate the many locations he had in his file. And then I found him mentioned in the circular of the “Historischer Verein Wolhynien e.V.” Nr. 44, where his address is given for ordering the book of Dr. Mykhailo Kostiuk with the title “Evangelisch-lutherische Kirche in Lutsk”. 

At the moment I am working on the village list found in another book of Dr. Kostiuk “Die deutschen Kolonien in Wolhynien”. I emailed Waldemar concerning a hitherto unseen transcription to German of the Russian letter “C” to “SS” and he answered that it must be single “S”. He told me also of another mistake with the Russian letter “B” which should be transcribed to “W” and not to “V”. I started looking at the village list in detail and found many more discrepancies and typing errors on both sides. The village list needs a complete renewal. 

I asked Waldemar about the Russian letter «Ж» that is an X with an I in the middle. In the guideline we transcribed that letter to “Sch” as the German Wikipedia was doing so: thus we wrote Schitomir. Waldemar told me that that is absolutely not ok and the Kostiuk village list is here ok. A look at the St. Petersburg church book front pages proved him right. There you see always Shitomir from 1835 up to 1885. The guideline says for Volhynian villages: first the Name used by the Germans (mostly Russian village name transcribed to German) and in brackets the Polish and the Ukrainian Name transcribed into English. Example: Toptscha (Topcza/Topcha). I revised the Volhynian Gazetteer and also the Location-Guideline on page 36. I used the opportunity and added on page 17 some internet addresses.

Greetings from Hamburg

Frank Stewner