Posen Place Name Indexes: Identifying Place Names Using Alphabetical and Reverse Alphabetical Indexes, by Roger P. Minert, (Provo, UT: GRT Publications, 2004), 101 pp., soft-cover, ISBN 0-9716906-6-9. $9.95 from <www.grtpublications.com>.
Note: Roger Meinert published a series of 23 books (and one CD) on the German provinces plus Switzerland between 2000 and 2006. The collection covers the entire German Empire as it was from 1871B1918. See <http://www. deutsche-schutzgebiete.de/>. All the publications are similar to the Posen volume which is reviewed here. The list is for soft-cover books, except as noted. The series covers the following jurisdictions:
Alsace-Lorraine, Baden, Bavaria, Brandenburg, Braunschweig/Oldenburg/Thuringia, East Prussia, Hanover, Hesse, Hesse-Nassau, Mecklenburg, Oldenburg, Palatinate, Pomerania, Rhineland, Kingdom of Saxony (including Anhalt), Province of Saxony, Schleswig-Holstein (with separate indexes for the free cities of Bremen, Hamburg, and Lübeck), Silesia, Thuringia, West Prussia, Westphalia (plus separate indexes for the small provinces of Hohenzollern, Lippe, Schaumburg-Lippe, and Waldeck), Wurttemberg, and Switzerland (only on CD, searchable by the entire country, by canton, or by a town=s parish affiliation).
The Posen book costs $9.95; other books in the series vary in price from $9.95 to $19.95. The CD for Switzerland is $9.95. There is an additional charge for postage and handling of $4 for the first book and 75 cents for each additional book or copy. The length of each publication varies, with Bavaria being the largest and most expensive at 287 pages.
As in the case of Meinert’s other books in the series, this book includes a map of the province; an introduction with a short history of the area; instructions in English and German on how to use the reverse alphabetical index; a similar explanation in German, entitled Gebrauchanweisung; a reverse alphabetical index for the province; an alphabetical index for the province; a reverse alphabetical index of German provinces; and finally an alphabetical index of German provinces. These last two indexes not only are lists of all of the provinces, first in reverse alphabetical order and then in alphabetical order, but also lists of related terms in German. These related terms describe political units of the province or similar subdivisions, such as the word for parish. Other terms, such as the German word Kaiserreich meaning Aempire,@ and names of regions of Germany are also included.
The alphabetical lists are in the order that one would expect, while the lists in reverse alphabetical order present the words in the way that they are spelled, but ordered according to reverse order. Thus, all of the locations ending in Ael@ are grouped by the last letter Al@ and then by the letter Ae@ and so forth from the end of the name to its beginning. As the author observes, this order is useful for persons who can read some, but not all, of the letters for a town name, particularly when the first letters in source material of interest are illegible or incorrect. For example, if you can read the last part of a place name but not the first letters, you can use the reverse alphabetical list to at least narrow down the possible towns.
The map used at the front of the book is printed in black and white. A more user-friendly color version is available at <www.unsere-ahnen.de/polen/provinz_posen/karte_provinz_ posen_1905.jpg.>
The introduction and other portions of the book contain useful bibliographies, but the author makes several errors in his discussion of Posen=s history. He lists the partitions of Poland as 1779, 1792, and 1795, whereas they occurred in 1772, 1793, and 1795. The author also is mistaken on some other points. Posen was not annexed to Prussia in 1871, as he states; rather, the Treaty of the Congress of Vienna in June 1815 made Posen part of Prussia (not a separate state) as the Grand Duchy of Posen and named the King of Prussia as the Grand Duke of Posen. Posen was also known as Great Poland, a direct translation from the Polish. Under the 1815 treaty, the eastern part of Great Poland was given to Russia and included the towns of Kalisch and Konin, never before separated from other parts of Great Poland, not by the partitions and not even by Napoleon in 1807 at the Treaty of Tilsit. In 1850, Posen was incorporated into the Kingdom of Prussia as its 17th (and newest) province, not its 13th, as stated by the author. Similarly, civil registration began prior to 1874 for some parts of Prussia, but became mandatory for the entire kingdom only on October 1, 1874. For example, Königsberg had civil registration for a very long period prior to 1874; the Mormons hold civil death records for the period 1829–63. The Mormons also hold a microfilm of 1809 civil marriage registrations for Danzig, Prussia. Other large towns had similar civil registration prior to 1874.
In his explanation for using the reverse alphabetical index, Minert observes that when multiple towns end in the same suffix (Polish frequently uses similar endings on town names, such as “owo” or “iec,” and German uses endings such as “walde” or “felde”), the next step in the identification process would be a search of church or civil records for each candidate parish or town—beginning in the location closest to the town in which the original record was written. To save effort, that process might begin by using Kartenmeister <www.kartenmeister.com/preview/databaseuwe.asp> or another online search engine to find the location of historic towns in Germany, including many no longer in that country.
For Posen and other areas such as Silesia, currently or formerly in Poland, even more extensive town descriptions may be found in the S»ownik geograficzny, along with many English translations at <www.polishroots.org/slownik/ slownik_index.htm>. This web page also leads to an English-language guide for online use of the dictionary and other relevant information, such as a translation guide and a glossary of unfamiliar terms used in the dictionary. The dictionary also may be accessed directly at <www.mimuw.edu.pl/polszczyzna/SGKPi>. Many large reference libraries have the set of 16 monumental volumes in hard copy.
The fact that many towns in Germany have shared the same or similar names at one time or another can create problems for researchers. For example, Posen province, which existed under other names until 1850 and under that name from 1850–1918, has had two important towns named Neustadt. One is Neustadt bei Pinne, and the other is Neustadt an der Warthe. One way to determine the town sought is to consider the Polish name for the same location. The first Neustadt is called Lwówek in Polish, while the second one is Nowe Miasto nad Wart. Amazingly, this researcher has never found two towns listed in the S»ownik geograficzny with the same name in both German and in Polish. For example, if the name of two towns in German is A for both, they will always be B and C in Polish. Thus, the researcher will find that two towns named A in German will be A and B for one and A and C for the other. So if the reader cannot identify the town by using only one language, check the name in both languages to have a better idea of which town it is. The situation also happens in reverse where towns with Polish names will always have different names from each other in German or some other local language. That fact is quite significant since the Polish post office today lists 39 towns in one case with the same name, but in each of the 39 cases of that name, the town has a different name in German, Russian, or other relevant local language. Thus, a researcher, unable to discern which of two towns with the same name is the desired one, should search his sources for the Polish name and compare the information with that found in the S»ownik geograficzny, which gives all names for the town in all local languages, including German, Polish, Russian, Czech, etc., whenever applicable, occasionally in as many as six languages. For example, if the Polish name is Wysoka, check to find the German name Wißek. There are 39 Wysokas but only one of them was also Wißek in German. Thus, the town will be found with certainty using this method.
While books in this series are useful when a handy reference to the names of towns in a province is needed, in either alphabetical or in reverse alphabetical order, their use is enhanced greatly by reference to the additional tools listed above. Perhaps the author will take such matters into account in future revisions.
Edward David Luft
Finding Your Canadian Ancestors:
A Beginner’s Guide
Finding Your Canadian Ancestors: A Beginner’s Guide, by Sherry Irvine and Dave Obee. Softcover, large format, 270 pages. Ancestry Publishing, Provo, Utah. $18.95. Available through Ancestry.com
Several Jewish-Canadian historians have done an admirable job in recent decades of demonstrating how thoroughly Jews were involved in early Canadian affairs, ranging from the fur trade to the expansion of British North America to the settlement of pre-Confederate cities from Halifax to Victoria. Writers such as Sheldon and Judith Godfrey (in their book Search Out the Land), Irving Abella (A Coat of Many Colors) and Gerald Tulchinsky (in his brand-new Canada’s Jews: A People’s Journey) have uncovered multitudes of remarkable and adventurous Jews pursuing happiness and fortunes in the territories that were confederated into the great Dominion of Canada between 1867 and 1949.
I forget which book I saw it in, but my mind’s eye vividly retains the image of some crazed Jewish adventurer—somebody’s Uncle Mendel, perhaps—happily smoking a peace pipe beside a tepee and campfire with the Indians of the Canadian Northwest. The odds are very slight (much less than one percent), however, that this was your grandfather’s Uncle Mendel. Despite the small number of Jews who ventured into these northern latitudes in the 19th century, and despite the first wave of Jewish refugees that landed here after 1880, the great masses of Jewish immigrants did not begin to arrive until the early 20th century (between 1904 and 1914).
Thus, likely only a very small proportion of Jewish researchers will need to refer to the 18th and 19th century material discussed in this book, just as they would likely not need the resources on aboriginal peoples or Acadian and Loyalist settlers. Catholic church records are perhaps useful for those with mixed religious background.
Still, researchers will benefit from the succinct summary of resources of the federal government’s Library and Archives Canada and its one-stop-shopping website, the Canadian Genealogy Centre. The censuses (up to 1911), immigration indexes, Soldiers of the First World War database and the phenomenal naturalizations index (courtesy of the Jewish genealogical societies of Montreal and Ottawa) are only some of the treasures available. An online database of the famed LI-RA-MA Collection, otherwise known as the Russian Consular Records, has also quietly been added to this site in the last couple of years.
The book offers chapters on all Canadian provinces and territories, but my guess is that those on Quebec, Ontario, and Manitoba (with their respective Jewish communities in Montreal, Toronto, and Winnipeg) will be of greatest interest to “Our Crowd.” Oh, also Saskatchewan, for the many daring souls who settled nearly a century ago in Hirsh, Estevan, Edenbridge, and other Jewish farming communities on the prairies. Researchers with mixed marriages in the family may also find ancestors anywhere from the Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick, to Dawson City, Yukon.
As a quick reference guide to Canadian genealogy, this book is quite adequate and seems all the more attractive by its relatively inexpensive price of $18.95.
Bill Gladstone
