ROOTS & BRANCHES

Last week’s “Roots & Branches” column covered some best practices for recording the place names of ancestral events.

The nut of it all is that it’s often wise to record place names as they were when the event being recorded occurred, with a parenthetical addendum showing the present-day identification of the place.

It was noted that this concept gets a little more complicated when you try to replicate it for foreign places with what I call a non-linear history, as opposed to the overwhelmingly linear history of the United States in which new counties, towns, townships, boroughs and cities were subdivided from existing ones after counties that were originally created.

Chief among the areas with non-linear history is Germany, with its chronology of many small states that sliced and diced as areas were conquered and minor dynasties died out and their land divided.

In this situation, the descriptions of where the event took place may differ radically from that time period to the present day. Most of today’s state-equivalent names date only from after World War II.

For a good example, let’s use the village of Elsoff, where a few of my Berks County ancestral lines originate. Today, we’d refer to it as “Elsoff, Siegen-Wittgenstein, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany,” with the middle two names being the Kreis (German equivalent of a district or county) and Land (state) to which Elsoff now belongs.

From the Congress of Vienna in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars (1815) through the German Second Empire period from 1871 to 1918, the proper documentation would be: “Elsoff, Wittgenstein, Arnsberg, Westfalen, Preussen,” which uses the German-language name for Prussia as the state name.

Earlier than that—and this is important because many of those emigrating from Elsoff came in the 1700s—it would simply be “Elsoff, Grafschaft Wittgenstein,” with Grafschaft meaning countship. Some people would append “Holy Roman Empire” on to the end of that but I’m a bit equivocal.

Wittgenstein was definitely a part of the Holy Roman Empire, but adding that is kind of showing a modern American place name as: “Leesport, Berks County, Pennsylvania, United States, United Nations.” The Holy Roman Empire, truthfully, was just about the equivalent in terms of authority. In a like manner, adding the national name “Germany,” while proper for the present-day place identifications, historically it becomes a bit of an anachronism before that Second Empire period.

Then there are also villages that are found in different nations historically vs. today and are generally known by more than one name, given language differences.

Many of these examples are the once-German towns now in Poland. Here again, you’ll want to use the place name as it was at the time of the event in question and put the modern equivalent in parentheses.

For example, take the town Finkenwalde, next to Stettin near the Baltic Sea. During the Second German Empire, it would be properly identified as: “Finkenwalde, Randow, Stettin, Pommern, Preussen,” but today would be known as “Zdroje, Szczecin, Poland.”