Website Wednesday - Meyer's Gazetteer

Meyer's is arguably the most important of all German gazetteers. The goal of the Meyer’s compilers was to list every place name in the German Empire (1871-1918). It gives the location, i.e. the state and other jurisdictions, where the civil registry office was and parishes if that town had them. It also gives lots of other information about each place. The only drawback to Meyer’s is that if a town did not have a parish, it does not tell where the parish was, making reference to other works necessary.

Searching Meyer's

Type the name of your place in the search box.

• You can use a wildcard * (an asterisk) in your search. For example, ‘*gheim’ will return ‘Balgheim, Bergheim, Bietigheim, Billigheim’ and anything else that ends in ‘gheim’.
• You can type only the beginning of a name and it will return all places that begin with those letters. For example, ‘Neu’ will return ‘Neu Abbau, Neu Abschwangen, Neuacker, Neuafrika’ and many others.
• You do not need to include umlauts; ‘Munchen’ and ‘München’ will return ‘München.’ You can type umlauts if you wish, but you should not expand umlauts, e.g. ‘ü’ as ‘ue’, as that will return no hits.

A list of places with that name will appear—all those places of the same name, but with other jurisdictions which will help you identify your town.

• You can ‘Filter results by region’ with the drop-down menu. The regions are the various states/provinces of the Second German Empire (1871-1918). Filtering will help you determine the correct town by narrowing the number of returns you get.

Choose the town for which you want more information. This takes you to the ‘Entry’ page.

• You will see the name of your town and a menu that includes the following items: Entry, Map, Ecclesiastical, Related, E-mail, and Feedback.  You can click on each for more information.
• You will see the entry as it appears in Meyer’s, the extraction of the entry, the explanation of the extraction, and a map. The extractions include and are primarily limited to jurisdictions and parish information. The explanations are helpful for those who do not speak German or are not familiar with the old jurisdictions. For example, you will learn what Kreis, Bezirkskommando, and Landgericht mean.
• By clicking on ‘View entry on PDF of the original page,’ you can see the entire page on which the entry appears.
• Click on ‘Show previous and next entry’ to see the previous and following entries. If there was a correction in the Meyer’s addendum, this will also be indicated.