Pamela Weisberger (President and Research Coordinator, Gesher Galicia Inc.) on “Using unique and unusual archival records and data to illustrate and annotate historical maps, bringing vanished communities to life” held on 28.04.2015 at the international conference "Archival Cooperation and Community Building in the Digital Age" within the panel “Geospatial Genealogy, Cadastral Maps and Digital Archives: Partnerships and Collaborations" at Břevnov Archabbey in Prague (CZ).

1. Gesher Galicia’s
Cadastral Map Room &
Galician Archival Records Project
A virtual recreation of a a vanished world

2. Gesher Galicia is an international
non-profit research group
focusing on the population
and history of Galicia, as
explored in community
genealogical records,
historical documents
and cadastral maps.
Introduction to Gesher Galicia

4. The Kingdom of Galicia was the largest and
northernmost province of Austria from 1772 until
1918, with Lemberg (Lwów, L'viv) as its capital city. It
was created from the territories taken from the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the
partitions of Poland and lasted until the dissolution
of Austria-Hungary at the end of the First World War.
Today Galicia is an historical region split between
Poland (Western Galicia) and Ukraine (Eastern
Galicia.) People who grew up hearing stories about
ancestors who came from “Austria,” it is highly
possible they
actually came from Galicia.

8. THE GACLIAN ARCHIVAL
RECORDS PROJECT
The Cadastral Map & Landowner Records Project
The Voter, School, Tax and Tabula Records Project
The Vital Records and Census Project
The Stanislawow 1939 Census and Passport
Applications Project
The Tarnopol 1910 Jewish Census Project
The Polish Magnate Records Project
The Austrian State Archives Project
The Austrian Ministries Project
The Galician Refugees Project

9. Lviv Historical Archives

11. Lviv Historical Archive Reading Room

12. Cartography
The art or technique of making maps or charts.
+
Genealogy
The study and tracing of lines
and descendants

16. THE GARP PROJECT
INCLUDES:
The Cadastral Map & Landowner Records Project
The Voter, School, Tax and Tabula Records Project
The Vital Records and Census Project
The Stanislawow 1939 Census and Passport
Applications Project
The Tarnopol 1910 Jewish Census Project
The Polish Magnate Records Project
The Austrian State Archives Project
The Austrian Ministries Project
The Galician Refugees Project

17. Stanislawow 1939 Census &
Regional Passport Applications Indexing
Project
Gitel Abzug
Basia Abzug
Hilda Abzug
Rachela
Hersch
Fryder
Amalja Blumenfeld
Klara Blumenfeld
Marek Blumenfeld

18. The Tarnopol 1910 Jewish Census
Project
14,000 + names
were indexed
last year and
are now
searchable
online on the
All Galicia
Database.

19. HOOL RECORDS FROM THE EARLY 20TH CENT

20. The Austrian Ministries Project
Example from the Austrian Ministries
Project of the regulation of licensed
alcohol sales. This is Chula Katz's
application to sell alcohol in 1907–1908
in Skołoszów and the
appeal when the
application was rejected.
The quantity of
dates, deadlines, and
other items shows
the level of bureaucracy
involved inconducting
business in the Austro-
Hungarian Empire.

23. The project objectives are:
⌂ to inventory archival property records and maps of
Galicia
⌂ to digitally photograph or scan cadastral maps
⌂ to digitize and/or index landowner records as
companion pieces to the maps
⌂ to create an online portal to display high resolution
maps and provide search engines for researching records
⌂ to annotate maps by merging data from records,
personal testimonies, newspapers, and ephemera to create
a multi-dimensional portrait of a town, showing its
evolution in a cartographic timeline

24. Cadastral maps are works of art, in full color with
great geographic detail, but they usually do not
display the names of the property owners or the house
numbers, which can both be seen on the “sketch”
(feldskizzen) maps. They will, however, have the land
parcel numbers.
Cadastral Maps

25. maps.geshergalicia.org

28. The “intermediate” or
Indikationskizzen map
RYNEK

30. Detail Map of Town Center  SKALA

33. Bukachivtsi Market Square over a span of years….
Kleinfeld, Schulim
Schwarz Sommer
Glanz Ainsil
Schenker Daniel
Dickmann, Alter

Szumski,
Roman
Pwaczyj, Mikolaj

35. KOMARNO

38. Detail maps of
the rynek

39. Flying Bridge
Post Office
Inn

40. ornamental
gardens
orchards
vegetable
gardens
vineyards
pastures swampcommunity
pastures
Hardwood forest
English garden
chestnut wood olive forest
sand & gravel
pits clay pits

41. BELZ CADASTRAL MAP
Two Synagogues


42. ETABL
RDEN 
hards

43. We can merge data from records with cadastral maps…
(he owned a tavern)
1810 TAX LIST

45. Who is Josef Perl?
TARNOPOL

46. Josef Perl, author
of the first Hebrew
(satirical) novel

47. BRODY had three cemeteries over hundreds of years...

48. We have inventories for Przemysl,
Rzeszow, Lviv Archives maps
and records...

50. The key to making data work is to provide it in a
searchable database:
http://search.geshergalicia.org

52. Click to
Sort by
record type
The plus
sign produces
more record
details
If you only
want records
for Ester click
just that name
The icon denotes
record type
(marriage)
The icon denotes
record type
(birth)
The ALL GALICIA DATABASE offers many searching & sorting options:

54. Here is how a search result appears on the All Galicia Database:
Ewa Citron was born in New York City!
(New-Jork, Ameryka)

55. Drohobycz

56. Drohobycz 1931 Jagiellonian
Gymnazium
Bruno Schulz 
School
Records
David Einsiedler 

57. Drohobycz
Gymnasium
Records

58. Grzymalow Children’s Census

59. Grzymalow Childrens’
Census

60. www.geshergalicia.org/videos/

61. SKALAT TAX
LIST
1936
Gesher Galicia has
many 20th
century records, an
important
factor in Holocaust-
era research

63. These contain information of genealogical value, documenting
the residents of towns and their interactions with the
nobility
Polish Magnate Landowner Records

64. Case studies for individual towns
highlighting the scope of documentation
available to researchers
Grzymalow Castle
originally built 1590

65. Full-color cadastral map of the center lithographed in 1828. shows
Developing market square with spaced masonry and wooden buildings,
grid-style housing ringing the market, the damaged but complete castle
structure, a Jewish cemetery and two Catholic cemeteries, plus a large synagogueand
two churches; outside the town center, two suburban villages are growing.

66. Castle 
Synagogue e
Jewish
cemetery 
the river
Market Square
Rynek 

67. CASTLE

70. Shops in the Rynek

71. Diener, ChajeBlitz, Hersch

72. Piotr Pininski
Great Great Grandson of
Count Leonard Pininski

73. Memories from a Polish Magnate
Landowner’s Family
I have a large collection of family photographs going
back to about the middle of the 19th century.
Grzymalow is today not even a shadow of what it once
was. However I have much of the castle and town
captured in photographs, including the late baroque
Roman Catholic church built by the Princes
Czartoryski, the castle rebuilt as a kind of palace by my
great great grandfather in the 1840's, the 17th century
synagogue, the great Steam Mill built by my great
grandfather in the early 1870's etc etc

74. April 2013

76. 
The Gatehouse

78. View from
the gatehouse
In 2013 

81. The synagogue today....

82. 
MEMORY MAPS
The chemist shop of
Mr. Braun
The castle

84. 1765 Inventory
For Grzymalow
Jewish Bakers
Christian
Bakers

85. Jewish
cemetery
on a 1939
hand-drawn
map


87. The Jewish Cemetery
of Grzymalow

90. List of creditors of Countess Constantia Rzewuska,
nee Lubomirska, c.1820

91. Public sale of the right to rent the properties of the town of Grzymalow, c.
1829
…Three groups of Jews turned up at
the public sale. Among them there
were the previous lease-holders from
the town of Satanow, person by the
name Atlas from the town of
Tarnopol, and the person by the
name old Lieber from Satanow.
Atlas took 100 rubles for not
interfering in the public sale.
The old Lieber gave 200 rubles to
the official responsible for the public
sale and promised to give him 400
rubles more if the lease contract will
be approved by the court as well as
50 rubles worth of goods namely
coffee, sugar, tea, tobacco and wax
candles to confirm the deal.

92. The 1828
file on Leopold
Anthony
Elkan
Von
Elkansburg
of Bavaria
The first
(Jewish)
owner of
Grzymalow

95. BAD ISCHL

96. The Evolution of Eleanorowka

97. Historical
and personal
Annotations
using a map
As the base

98. List of Kalush pub keepers 1801
1 Joel Schenker , # 357 Died in 1800.Widow
is keeping pub
10 Lachman Reis ,# 343. Bought the house in
1800
14 Naftula Hochman, # 339. Bought house
along with vodka distillery in 1788
15 Juda Fogel,# 338. Bought house in 1801
20 Chaje Lewin, # 330. Died in 1793
22 Samuel Friedman,# 328. Died in 1801.Had
sold vodka distillery equipment as per his
widow

99. Marcus Luz
(profession:
Kramarz)
Chune Roth
Moses Ausfchmitt
Moses Rosenfeld
Ben Herschmen
Josef Landau
Brody Voters List 1874

100. SUMMONS
The magistrate of the free
Hanseatic town of Brody
asks the following people to
register: all individuals due for
military service but absent
during the recruitment of
1846 on the Ussenplatz have
to register within six weeks
and
must explain why they did not
show up, or they will be
treated according to the
current rules as “draft
dodgers.”

103. ERMAN CONSULAR VISA APPLICATIONS LWOW
Gesher Galicia is digitizing and indexing visa and passpor
applications

104. Emigration application of Leon Sobel

105. Stanislawow Passport Application

106. Passport for
Esther Blima Berner 1928
The Indexing Cooperative
will extract names, birth dates,
and key family information
from these records.
Most of them have
photographs of the
applicants.

107. Landowner
Records

108. Landowner records provide a
rich historical accounting of a
town’s residents, their
property and livelihood. Our
search engine intergrates
digital records with our
databases.

109. SKALAT TAX LIS
1936

110. World War I Records (Lviv Archive)
“People who suffered during the war”
Circa 1918
Meilach David
& Eisig Flank

113. List of people who bought sheckels in Obertyn


114. Buczacz 1914

115. Tarnow 1914 - WWI

116. Stryj Marketplace
Like Google Street-View of the World War I era...

118. Merging Maps with Data
Annotating the maps to bring the towns to life....
Yizkor Books

120. Shmul Pickholz
lived in the Rynek House #8

121. We can merge data from records with cadastral maps…
(he owned a tavern)

122. Facebook & Crowdsourcing

124. Before the war, Sanok had six synagogues; two survivors can
be found in town today, along with a number of other buildings
and sites of Jewish significance. The "new" Jewish cemetery,
which can be visited, is on Kiczury St. Only about 50
headstones remain today, the others having been used by the
Nazis to pave Sanok roads.

125. www.geshergalicia.org

126. The End!
THE END!