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).
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.
