Genealogy and Maps -- A sample question that demonstrates some strategies and resources

All,

Thought I'd share this with you to give you all a taste of how questions get extended in the Map & GIS collection. And since you could easily get an initial question like this at the reference desk it might be useful for you to see what the possibilities are.

A Cornell employee came in with an interesting question. He was attempting to locate the village in Poland from which his great-grandparents had immigrated. To make it a little trickier he wanted maps close to the time the ggrandparents had left, which was the turn of the century.

Howard fielded the question initially. He was aware from previous questions of several useful gazetteers of Poland. These are really a great resource--between them they have every little village and hamlet in Poland. We have a whole series of these gazetteers for any place in the world. There's also a comprehensive online Columbia Gazetteer of the World (in Find Databases )--but this village wasn't in it. I discovered later that it was in the very powerful GeoNames Server from NIMA: http://gnswww.nga.mil/geonames/GNS/index.jsp , so I could have used that. There's a  gazetteer devoted to the former Austro-Hungarian Empire (modern day Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, parts of Poland, Slovenia, and Ukraine), Hungarian village finder, atlas, and gazetteer for the Kingdom of Hungary, which we don't have--I'm looking into purchasing it. The print gazetteer gave all the alternate spellings--in the Empire, for example, many towns had three versions of their names: German, Hungarian and the native slavic language, e.g.  Bardejov, a town in  Slovakia was Bartfa in Hungarian and Bartfeld in German--and the gazetteer gives the latitude and longitude, so the villages can be located on modern maps.

There are some other resources

Shtetl-Finder Gazetteer which we have in print (DS135 R9) version. There an online database also http://www.jewishgen.org/ShtetlSeeker/ , which has much more information on specific villages--and you can use mapquest to locate them! This is valuable because many villages were wiped out in the world wars and the holocaust. Even though the Shtetl-Finder concentrates on Jewish communities it's useful for any ethnic or religious group.

I also found a curious CD in the 8th floor stacks while I was reviewing the folio atlases for removal. It's called Finding your Ancestral Village in the Old Austro-Hungarian Empire. I fired it up and it turns out to be a Word document with links to various sites. You wouldn't think it would have much staying power, but all the links were still active--and pretty useful.

To return to the story, Howard and the patron were able to locate the village on a modern map of Poland. The problem then became finding older maps.

We had some older maps of Poland but at pretty small scales--too small to indicate the village.

An unexpected resource was the 1005 fiche set made from 200 1:75,000 topographic maps of the Austro-Hungarian Empire from around 1880:

Author/Creator: Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Militärgeographisches Institut.
Title: Spezialkarte der österreichisch-ungarischen Monarchie [microform] / K.u.K. Militärgeographisches Institut.
Published: [San Diego : Western Association of Map Libraries, 1990]
Description: Microform
Scale 1:75,000.
1005 fiches ; 11 x 15 cm.
Subject(s): Austria--Maps, Topographic.
Europe, Central--Maps, Topographic.
Hungary--Maps, Topographic.
Map Format: Scale 1:75,000.
Location: Olin Library
Call Number: Microfiche 943

Not the most obvious source--one has to think more broadly than "Poland" to realize that it could be helpful--and I only was vaguely aware of their existence--and not at all aware that we had them--from a chance mention of a project to digitize a related set I heard at the conference I was just at in Washington. Anyway, the patron's village of interest was very near the modern Slovak border, so I thought we might get lucky with overlap. We did.

There is an ongoing project to index and present a related map series online:

http://www.rlg.org/en/page.php?Page_ID=20522&Printable=1&Article_ID=1710

This is at a smaller scale and lacks the same density of topographic information, but it's quite an achievement. And the village is there, too.

Bob

Bob Kibbee
Map & GIS Librarian
Instruction, Research & Information Services (IRIS)
017 Olin Library, Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853-5301
voice 607-255-9566 / fax 607-255-9346