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/
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.
A shtetl (Yiddish: שטעטל) was typically a small town or village with a large Jewish population in pre-Holocaust Central and Eastern Europe. ShtetlSeeker is an online
feature hosted by the Jewish Gen Web site locating settlements in 31 countrys that are currently located in this region. It covers linguistic and historic variants for names. It is also possible to search by latitude and longitude to locate towns in close proximity and to display maps using links to MapQuest, Expedia, or MultiMap.
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.
