The first day of the consular term, which was effectively the first day of the year, changed several times during Roman history. It became 1 January in 153 BC, and this remained the start of the year after the Julian reform.
The Gregorian calendar decreed by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 is the most widely used calendar in the world today.
Depending on confession and cultural area there were and still are in use traditional calendars and seasonal days of celebration.
There are also technical-scientific models for describing points or intervals in time.
Our holiday-riddle is about conversion of different time specifications in Gregorian Date. The solution term is a number and results from the addition of the digit sums of 10 Gregorian Dates.
–>archivauskunft.de Holiday Riddle : calendar (PDF, 76 KB)
Please, send us your solution until January, 4th 2009, 24.00 CET via Mail.
The Winners could choose between the following prizes:
- Korfmann Sekt (sparkling wine) Scheurebe extra dry 0,75l, being made according to the méthode traditionnelle
- Anno Domini, Abacus-card-game (theme of own choice)
- archivauskunft.de T-Shirt (cut and size of own choice)
Solution of the archivauskunft.de Advent-Riddle
פ”נ
הישה הישרה והנכבדה
מרת
פיגלכא
אשת כ’ אברהם גרינטהאל
ז”ל
נפטרה ביום א’ ר”ח סיון
ונקברה ביום ב’ ב’ בו תר”ז לפ”ק
תנצב”ה
The example shows a tombstone with a typical Hebrew inscription from the database “Jewish Cemeteries in Brandenburg” The dates of death and burial are written in Hebrew according to the Jewish calendar, which starts its “year one” with the Creation of the World and came up with a calendar that begins 3760 years before the Christian calendar.
For example, the current jewish year 5769 will be written as 769, but the 5000 is usually left off. To compute the civil (Gregorian) year, simply add the number 1240 to the shortened Hebrew year. The letters of the Hebrew Alphabet each have a numerical value, specified in the accompanying chart.
In our example, we read from right to left Tav, Resh, Zain which in numbers is 400+200+7, the Jewish year 607. By using our formula 607 plus 1240 the civil year of death is 1847.
Half a century after the “Zimmermann” Johann Georg Knie (1794-1859) published a new and well-structured gazetteer of Silesia including the following data:
- place name in german and its variants in Polish, Sorbian, Czech
- form of settlement (hamlet, village, town)
- civil and church jurisdictions over those places
- location
- manor, population size, religious denominations, schools
- economy, infrastructure
- list of abbreviations, pronunciation of Polish terms
Knie, Johann Georg, Alphabetisch-Statistisch-Topographische Uebersicht aller Dörfer, Flecken, Städte und andern Orte der Königl. Preuß. Provinz Schlesien, mit Einschluß des ganzen jetzt zur Provinz gehörenden Markgrafthums Ober-Lausitz, und der Grafschaft Glatz: nebst beigefügter Nachweisung von der Eintheilung des Landes nach den verschiedenen Zweigen der Civil-Verwaltung, Breslau 1830
Historical gazetteers are an important reference for local history and genealogy. Names of places and their belonging to church-, administration- and jurisdiction districts changed often in former Silesian areas. Friedrich Albert Zimmermann discribed already at the end of the 18. century towns and villages of the following duchies and counties of Prussian-Silesia in 13 volumes of his geographical directory: vol. 1: Duchy of Brieg (Brzeg), vol. 2: Upper Silesia I, vol. 3: Upper Silesia II, vol. 4: Duchy of Münsterberg, vol 5: Duchy of Schweidnitz, vol. 6: Duchy of Jauer, vol. 7: Duchies of Sagan and Wohlau and the Counties of Militsch and Wartenberg, vol. 8: Duchy of Liegnitz, vol. 9: County of Glatz, vol. 10: Duchy of Glogau, vol. 11: City of Breslau, vol. 12: Duchy of Breslau, Band 13: place and subject index and a chronicle of Oberglogau.
To browse the single volumes online at Silesian Digital Library it is necessary to install the djvu-Browser-Plugin.
The archivist, writer and filmmaker Rick Prelinger founded the Prelinger Archives, a collection of 60,000 advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur films acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002. Prelinger has partnered with the Internet Archive to make 1,970 films available online for free viewing, downloading and reuse.
Round 1900 Georg Dehio established a guide to the German architectural monuments (Handbuch der Deutschen Kunstdenkmäler). It is a comprehensive reference book for people interested in the history of arts. At the same time the “Dehio” can serve as a detailed and compact guide for discovering architectural treasures off the beaten tourist tracks.
The “Dehio” series is expanded and updated constantly. Meanwhile buildings of the 19th century, of the modern era as well as technical monuments are part of this reference book. Information about single monuments are amended by introductions to municipal history of larger towns and cities considering which take into consideration also aspects of preservation and urban development. Maps, indexes of street and place names, registers of objects and artists and and a glossary make the use of the “Dehio” very easy and comfortable.
Reclams art guides (Reclams Kunstführer) are a similar series of reference books to art monuments. They are less encyclopaedic and addressed to a broader readership. Therefore they contain photographs and information about museums, collections, etc. The series was published between 1958 and 1994 and contains volumes to Germany (without the regions of the former GDR), Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, Austria, Sweden, Spain, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Turkey.
The transliteration of characters from non-Latin scripts differs from target language to target language and from purpose to purpose (literal/phonetic). The encoding of special characters that are used in these transliterations does as well.
The online-converter 2cyr.com now provides a tool for the automatic transliteration of languages written in Kyrillic to Latin script and vice versa. It is also possible to use an individually created transliteration for special needs.
For the lack of a common one-to-one encoding of characters within one transliteration system the machine-based conversion of bibliographic data is difficult. Nevertheless 2cyr.com is a useful instrument and with the help of a screen keyboard it is possible to make requests to Unicode-based library catalogues, bibliographical databases, search engines in general and paste the received information to the own reference management software.
individuelle Anpassung der Umschrift für jedes einzelne Zeichen
The archive of the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen stores 26,000 running metres of various types of record. The alphabetically and phonetically arranged Central Name Index contains over 50 million reference cards for over 17.5 million victims of Nazi persecution. Previously, viewing the archive was limited only to survivors and close relations of the dead. The general public has been granted access for research purposes as of 28th November 2007. The recent opening of the archives to historical research was marked at a ceremony on 30 April 2008 at the archive centre.
Digital copies of much of the archives have already been sent to the Yad Vashem Memorial in Jerusalem, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and the National Institute of Remembrance in Warsaw.
Eulogies, which were written and published on the occasion of birthdays, baptism, wedding, inauguration, anniversaries or death, form a unique biographic source. Printed funeral sermons for aristocrats, citizens and dignitaries were very popular in the Protestant cultural area between 1550 and 1750. They usually contain names, dates, places, relatives, life histories, and sometimes also information about the following generations.
The Research Centre for Personnel Writings at the Philipps University Marburg has made this source accessible for online-use by providing bibliographical data such as: names of the deceased, the widows and the preachers, place names, dates of funerals and the publication of the sermon, etc.
Picture: Title page of the funeral sermon for Samuel Sultze from Naumburg, Title Page Catalogue of Funural Sermons and other Personal Writings of the University Library Wroclaw/Breslau, Sign. 421542
Discovery of America. - Copper engraving, 65 x 101 mm. In: Der Mensch von Anbeginn bis auf unsre Zeiten / Hempel, Friedrich Wilhelm. - Leipzig, 1809 = [1809]. - S. 174/175, Pictura Paedagogica Online, Bibliothek für Bildungsgeschichtliche Forschung, IDN=b0014875berl
The image database Pictura Paedagogica - a co-operation between the Library for Research of Educational History (BBF), Berlin and the Institute for Applied Educational Science and General Didactics at the University of Hildesheim, provides access to illustrations from children’s and schoolbooks, bibles and atlases, postcards and magazines of the 15th-20th century.
Woodcuts, copper- and steel-engravings, also photographs can be searched by title, names, subjects or by time chart. In addition to a free working-copy of the picture (an image with a resolution of 75 dpi) it is possible to order a high-quality reproduction.
