When Poland regained its independence in 1918 it faced a challenge of making a new set of maps for a new country. Its first task was to form a coherent and updated system from the maps of Polish territory originally drawn by the partitioning powers (German, Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires). By 1939 all 482 sheets for the area of pre-war Poland were published, together with around 280 additional sheets (”wyłącznie do użytku służbowego” or “for internal use only”) to cover the adjacent areas of neighbouring countries, i.e. USSR, Lithuania, Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania. Nowadays these maps are a source of information about pre-WW2 Poland. They can be used e.g. to locate villages which have long disappeared from the ground or to find former names of streets and buildings on historical city maps.
A private, non-profit projekt provides free online access to scanned maps and other materials published and owned by the “WIG” (Wojskowy Instytut Geograficzny).
http://english.mapywig.org/
New York. Ellis Island. Immigrants walking across pier from bridge. National Photo Company Collection No. 3163E (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)
Census and immigration records often show the short label “Posen” as the place of origin for German, Jewish and Polish immigrants. The Poznan Marriage Indexing Project helps descendants of those who left the Poznan area in the 19th century to identify the actual town or parish their ancestors left when departing for America, Australia or elsewhere. The period between 1835-1884 corresponds to the period of greatest emigration.
The database is located at:
http://bindweed.man.poznan.pl/posen/search.php
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.
Historical adress books are a very important reference for the sciences of regional, social and economic history as well as for the genealogy. Increasingly libraries and archives make this source accessible for the online use. For example the adress books Poznań which one can research in the Digital Library of Wielkopolska. The time-frame runs from the Prussian provincial capital Poznań (Adress- und Geschäfts- Handbuch der Stadt Posen 1879) to the voivodship capital Poznań during the Second Polish Republic (Księga adresowa dla handlu-przemysłu stoł. M. Poznania 1936/37).
Furthermore one can use the volumes, that one can retrieve in the catalogues of the Berlin State Library or the Herder-Institut Marburg as well as the 1835 Posen City Directory (Polish-Roots).
Current results in scientific research are particularly published and discussed in journals and anthologies.
Online catalogs of libraries very often do not contain bibliographical references to articles. The latter can be found in databases related to specific fields of research.
These databases mostly are not available online, but Litdok provided by the Herder-Institut Marburg is. Litdok contains bibliographical references to articles on the history of East Central Europe. A user interface
with the possibility to choose between ten languages and multilingual subject headings offer a comfortable search for literature in different languages.
The Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy offers reproductions of maps of the eastern regions that belong to Germany before 1918. Topograhic maps (1: 25 000,
1: 100 000) as well as general maps of East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia (1: 300 000) can be purchased online.
The data base “historical place names” provides information about various different names of villages and cities in the past and about the affiliation of the settlements to administrative districts.
In the next months we will introduce a sequence of digitalization projects of JewishGen or, respectively Jewish Records Indexing - Poland. We start with the Polish Business Directory from 1929 (including Gdansk) for trade, industry, handicraft and agriculture.
Browsing the singular PDF-files is rather uncomfortable as access is realized only by Voivodships of Poland. If possible it might be easier to order the printed version
to the reading-room of a library:
Księga Adresowa Polski (Wraz z w.m. Gdańskiem) dla Handlu, Przemysłu, Rzemiosł I Rolnictwa / Annuaire de la Pologne (y compris…Dantzig) pour le commerce,
l’industrie, les métiers et l’agriculture
Motivated by a current review in “Sehepunkte” we would like to draw your attention to a
series of guides to inventories of Polish Archives. The guide for the State Archive of Szczecin already is accessible free of charge in the www. According to the information of the editor, the Federal Institute for the Culture and History of the Germans in Eastern Europe, guides for the State Archives of Wrocław and Gdańsk will follow in short time. Even if you are not German or Polish speaking an integrated index of places’ and institutions’ names and cross references between Polish and German terms provide easy access to the guide.
The “Slownik geograficzny Krolestwa Polskiego” gives a historical and physical description of almost all cities, towns, villages and hamlets in Poland and nearby Slavic countries along with mention of historically important events, buildings such as churches and personages.
Most important is the fact that the descriptions are circa 1880 to 1902, or about the time when most Poles were starting to leave Poland.
The Polish Genealogical Society of America offers a CD-ROM-edition. The dictionary is also available in archives and libraries.
