Villages and Maps

 

Helpful Hint: Many maps on the Internet can be viewed at two levels. The first makes detailed review impossible due to the small size. The enlarged view is so detailed that navigating is difficult. Right click the small image and download it to your computer. Then use your favorite picture viewer to open the image and enlarge it to a convenient size. Some downloads can take a long time due to large file sizes.

Maps in the first section are on this site. All other maps are linked to other websites.


SGGEE Map Resources

1. SGGEE Location Guidelines and Gazetteers
The possibility of finding an ancestral village on a map has many advantages and enriches your family research. Members of SGGEE have therefore created a guideline for locations and have assembled six village gazetteersto help with the search of villages of your ancestors in Eastern Europe. This will also serve to standardize the location naming and thus make the merging of your data with the Master Pedigree Database easier. We especially appreciate the efforts of Dr. Frank Stewner in Germany who was the primary contributor to this project. The gazetteers are copyrighted by Dr. Frank Stewner and are used by SGGEE with permission.

The standards below will help you to find your village and understand the governmental districts and boundary changes that have taken place over the past two centuries. The gazetteers will help you to find the villages and include actual map coordinates to take you to a precise location. They will also help you to correctly enter village locations in Legacy or other genealogy software.

Gazetteers in general: all gazetteers can be downloaded as pdf files which can be searched using the Adobe Reader "Find" feature. The Gazetteers are updated regularly. Present versions are from August 2021.

A note about latitude and longitude given in the gazetteers: These are given in degrees-minutes-seconds [ddmmss]. Because of the curvature of the earth, the distance of one second varies with the degree of latitude. At 50° it is approximately 30 metres or 100 feet. Therefore the location shown is very precise and your actual village size will extend well beyond that specific location. To use these numbers in GOOGLE Earth, you will have to change the format to [dd mm ss N dd mm ss E].

We separated Eastern Europe into three Empires of 1900: Russian Empire, Austrian Empire and German Empire.

The government of Ukraine reduced the number of Rayons considerably on 18. July 2020. Therefore Gazetters of Volhynia, Ukraine and Galicia were changed.

New: We marked Mennonite villages in the first column with „m“ and created a new Gazetteer containing all Mennonite villages found in the various gazetteers: Mennonite villages in SGGEE Gazetteers.

Russian Empire

2. SGGEE Scanned Maps Page
SGGEE has scanned a number of maps and converted them in a variety of formats.

3. Searchable Index to the SGGEE Scanned Maps
Search an index of the maps scanned by SGGEE. Gives the location by map name and grid coordinate.

4. Jerry Frank's Map of German Settlements of the 19th Century in Eastern Europe

5. Jerry Frank’s Maps of Russian Poland (PDF format)
Orientation mapSearchable Index for Poland maps available to members only

6. Jerry Frank’s Maps of Volhynia (PDF format)
Orientation mapSearchable Index for Volhynia maps available to members only

7. If you have ever wondered which district a village was located in within the province of Volhynia, then take a look at this map, created by Jerry Frank, that shows the district boundaries in Volhynia as they existed in 1899. The orange-brown lines are the boundaries. The same map by others in Russian.

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Poland

Volhynia

Maps of Poland, Volhynia, and other parts of Eastern Europe

Maps and Village Locator for pre-World War I Germany

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