+----------------------------------------------------------------------+ How To Find Your Fugitive Shtetl [Town] +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ A JewishGen InfoFile By Mel Comisarow To find a fugitive shtetl [town], I recommend these three important gazetteers: o "JewishGen Gazetteer" o "United States Board on Geographic Names (1970)" o "Where Once We Walked" (WOWW) Each has certain advantages and each should be consulted as part of a thorough search. 1) JewishGen Gazetteer -- This is a web accessible gazetteer, at: http://www.jewishgen.org/Communities The JewishGen Gazetteer search engine uses soundex for searching so exact spelling will not be needed to find your town. The JewishGen Gazetteer returns the town coordinates for each successful search. The JewishGen Gazetteer has a feature that lists all towns within a certain distance of a location. Thus if you are uncertain of a town name but know the town was near a larger town, just look up the coordinates of the larger town with the JewishGen Gazetteer, and then use the distance feature of the JewishGen Gazetteer to find all towns near the larger town. 2) USBGN Gazetteer -- A second way to locate your town is the following: Go to your local library and ask to see the United States Board on Geographic Names (1970) gazetteer. Look in the several volumes of USBGN that cover eastern Europe and the Russian empire. Be flexible with respect to spelling; v can be b, ch can be kh, r can be l, sh can be zh, s can be sh or z, f can be v, g can be h, j can be i, ei can be ay, and all vice versa, vowels are interchangeable, etc., etc. Your known town name may be the historical name which is no longer in use. USBGN will likely give the historical name with a "see" pointer to the modern name. It is common for many different towns in the Russian empire to have the same name so it can be important to have a general idea of the location of your town. The USBGN Gazetteer contains many historical names no longer in use. The USBGN gazetteer also lists rivers, lakes, mountains and other geographic features. See the web version search engine at: GEOnet Names Server (GNS) http://www.nima.mil/gns/html/index.html Unfortunately, this version of the USBGN gazetteer contains only modern names. 3) An invaluable gazetteer for Jewish researchers is "Where Once We Walked" (WOWW). WOWW will give the modern name of your town using USBGN spelling which is the name in the indigenous language, not English. The English name will also be listed with a "see" pointer to the indigenous name. WOWW will also give the Yiddish name with a "see" pointer if the Yiddish name was known to the authors. The town name expressed in Yiddish by Jews may or may not be the same the town name used by the indigenous Russian, Ukrainian, Polish or Lithuanian people of the region. The major advantage of WOWW is that it will give the Yiddish town name if known. The major limitation of WOWW is that it will not list most towns that had only a few Jewish families. Some features of above gazetteers can be illustrated with the following examples: My paternal grandmother was born in a town whose historical and modern Russian (Ukrainian) name is Novozlatopol and whose Yiddish name was Pervenumer. Both Novozlatopol and Pervenumer are given in WOWW. USBGN gives only Novozlatopol. My paternal grandfather was born in a town whose historical Russian name was Grafskoy and whose modern Russian name is Proletarsky. Each of USBGN and WOWW gives only Proletarsky. The name Grafskoy can only be found on the historical Russian maps described below. If only the historical town name is known, it can be critical to know the names of nearby towns or other geographic features that are listed in one of the above gazetteers. Some Jews lived in German colonies in Russia. Often only the number of the town ("German Colony number _"), but not the name is recalled. In this case the town name and location can be learned by contacting: American Historical Society of Germans From Russia (AHSGR) 631 D Street Lincoln NE 68502-1199 USA Telephone: (402) 474-3363 Fax: (402) 474-7229 AHSGR@aol.com https://digitale.securesites.com/ahsgr.org/ Once you have the coordinates for your town write to: Library of Congress Geography and Map Division (LCGMD) Washington, DC 20540-4761 202-707-6277, 202-707-8555 202-707-8531 (fax) Request photocopies of the maps of your towns from: 1) The Russian maps of 1865 and 1920 (the maps might be the same) 2) The German maps of 1941. 3) The modern (1970-1990) Soviet Army maps. 11 inch x 17 inch (28 cm x 43 cm) tiles from the maps are free. LCGMD replies take about 4-8 weeks. LCGMD has a map reproduction service that supplies complete maps on 2 feet x 3 feet (0.61 m x 0.91 m) sheets of paper for $4.00 per sheet plus shipping. Mail or fax your request along with your credit card number and expiry date to: Photoduplication Service Library of Congress Geography and Map Division Washington, DC 20540-5230 (202) 707-1771 (fax) and request "oversize Xerox copies (B&W)" of your desired maps. These LCGMD replies also take about 4-8 weeks. The Library of Congress Geography and Map Division (LCGMD) Russian maps, LCGMD call number G7010 s126 .R8, have a scale of 1:126,000 (1 cm = 1.26 km/1 inch = 2 mile) and have Cyrillic lettering that will indicate the historical Russian name that may or may not be the same as the Yiddish name that you know. The LCGMD historical Russian maps have two longitude scales with Pulkova = 0 and Paris, France = 0. The LCGMD German maps, LCGMD call number G6965 s300 .G4, have a 1:300,000 scale (1 cm = 3 km/1inch = 4.7 mile) with a Greenwich = 0 longitude scale and will have the modern town name expressed with German spelling. German s = English z, German ss = English s, German z = English ts, German w = English v,German j = English y, and so on. The modern Soviet Army maps, LCGMD call number G3200 s200 .R6, have a scale of 1:200,000 (1 cm =2 km/1 inch = 3.14 mile), a Greenwich = 0 longitude scale and Russian Cyrillic lettering. The Soviet army maps were widely sold on the map market in the middle nineties and may be available in your local map library. The Soviet Army maps can be recommended to anyone making a trip to the region of coverage as they can be more accurate than commercial maps, even those with later publication dates. To convert from Polkova to Greenwich, add 31 degs. 20 mins to the longitude value shown on the map. To convert from Paris to Greenwich, add 2 degs. 20 mins. The 1941 "modern" name may or may not be same as the post-WWII "modern" name. Also note that with the collapse of the Soviet regime in the 1990s some towns with Bolshevized names have reverted to their historical names. The map library of the British Museum in London, England also has an extensive collection of historical small scale maps of Eastern Europe. This map library is probably the best first map source for researchers in London. I also suggest examining as many small scale maps as possible of your region of interest. Also examine maps from different eras. I have found errors on maps, such as missing town names, that become obvious as errors after examining other maps of the same region. Different maps may also show detail more clearly. More modern maps should also be more accurate. Maps for different eras will show the changes of town names with time. Any large metropolitan area or any large university will probably have a sizable map library. Web source for large scale (1:6,000,000) historical maps of Eastern Europe is Federation of East European Family History Societies (FEEFHS) FEEFHS MAP ROOM http://feefhs.org/maps/indexmap.html These are good maps for finding the gubernias (provinces) of the Russian empire. A list of gubernias and their capital cities is given in http://www.jewishgen.org/InfoFiles/ru-pale.txt The Summer 2001 issue of Avotaynu has an interesting article by Dr. Stephen Paczolt, a specialist in Slavic and Central European maps at LCGMD. This article describes the LCGMD collection of historical and contemporary maps of Central Europe and Eastern Europe. The Perry-Castaņeda Library Map Collection of the University of Texas Online Library http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/index.html has a useful collection of online modern maps. WWII-era aerial reconnaissance photographs -- The US National Archives has WWII-era aerial reconnaissance photographs of Russian villages. To order these photos write to: National Archives and Records Administration Cartographic and Architectural Branch 8601 Adelphi Road College Park, MD 20740-6001 USA specifying the modern name and longitude/latitude coordinates of the villages of interest. Also include a map showing the town(s). I suggest using the LCGMD 1941 German maps. The Archive will reply giving their reference number for the photo along with a list of commercial firms who will retrieve the photo from the Archives and make contact copies, enlargements and/or digital scans. The cost is approximately $25 per contact photo including shipping. The Archive has 10 inch X 10 prints, from which negatives and positive prints, enlargements and digital scans can be made. The photos have a scale range of 1:7000 to 1:40,000 (1 cm = 70 meters to 400 meters) and are shot on high resolution film such that with the aid of a 10X loupe, a magnifier available in any camera store, objects as small as a meter can sometimes be seen. Photos that were shot in sequence, presumably a few seconds apart, will have some geographic overlap between the two photos. It is possible that the village of interest could appear in two or more photos with a clearer image in one photo compared to the other(s). It might be worthwhile to also order the adjacent photos to get the clearest image of interest. I recommend ordering digital scans on a Kodak PhotoPro CD in preference to 10x10 inch photos. Even sub-entry-level (133 MHz Pentium or 140 MHz Mac PPC) computers of today have sufficient computational horsepower to quickly manipulate these scanned images. Once the digital image has been loaded it is easy to crop, blowup, annotate, and adjust scale and/or contrast using any readily available graphics program. The Archive village name index is not complete and some Archive photos have images of villages that are not indexed. It might be wise to query about several neighboring villages, obtainable for example from the 1941 LCGMD German maps, in the hope that at least one of them is indexed. Inclusion of a map with your query can be critical in this case. Also-- I have corresponded with several Jewishgenners who when searching ShtetlSeeker or some other gazetteer find that there are several towns that seem to match the supposed ancestral town. Without some other information, such as the names of neighboring towns or rivers, the researcher is unable to select an ancestral town from the multi-town list. I would like to emphasize the importance of locating the naturalization documents for ancestors. I recently received the 1919 Canadian naturalization documents for my grandfather and while most of the documents stated that he was from "Russia", one of the documents listed the birth town, county/district (uyezd) and province (gubernia). Obviously, knowing the county and province of birth is of enormous aid in selecting the town of birth from a list of towns with similar names. I don't know if Canadian naturalization documents from other eras or if naturalization documents from other jurisdictions give birth, county and province. ------------------ [15March2000mc]bik 15Aug2001 filename shtetfnd.txt Copyright 1999-2001 JewishGen Inc. http://www.jewishgen.org +----------------------------------------------------------------------+