Deciphering Misspelled Place Names

From German Girls Genealogy (Teresa Steinkamp McMillin & Debra A. Hoffman):

 

Last week, we talked about Debra’s ancestor, Wilhelm Heinrich Weber, who was born in Wahlen, Alfeld, Hessen in historic Germany. She found the name of his birthplace in his church funeral record. That record gave his birthplace as “Whalen, Kreis Alsfeld, Hess. Darmstadt.”

 

To find information about places in historic Germany, a popular tool among US researchers is Meyers Gazetteer(https://www.meyersgaz.org/). We just call it Meyers. Originally in book form, this has been transcribed into a database with many added features, including wildcard searches. 

 

If you search for “Whalen” in Meyers, you will receive no results. That is because the town in the church record was misspelled. I will demonstrate a few solutions.

 

The second portion of the place name in the church record is “Kreis Alsfeld.” Kreis (abbreviated in Meyers as “Kr”) is a word that translates to district. It is kind of like us saying “county.” The scribe was telling us that Whalen was in the district called Alsfeld. So let’s see if Alsfeld is in Meyers. It is!

 

 

In that entry, we see that Alsfeld is a Kreis Stadt, which means it’s a larger city and the seat of the district Alsfeld. It’s kind of like Chicago is the seat for Cook County. In the light gray bar across the top of this entry, you’ll see the word “Related.” This will show me places related to Alsfeld. Click on that.

 

 

There are three categories. We want to know which towns are in the Kreis Alsfeld. I click on the arrow next to “Kr.” The window expands to show a list of town names. Read through the list to see if any name looks similar to Whalen. Almost at the bottom, there’s an entry “Wahlen 1) Kr. Alsfeld.” That is the closest match and it is the town we want!

 

Another approach to this problem would be to do a wildcard search, removing the vowels and the often-silent letter ‘h.’ Using this approach, I type “w*l*n” and press enter. Each * substitutes any number of letters. Doing this gives a LOT of results. But we know it’s in Hess. Darmstadt. See the “Filter results by region” at the top? From that list select “Hessen.” Once done, “Wahlen 1) Kr. Alsfeld” is the first result. 

 

 

I’m glossing over a whole lot of history about Hesse Darmstadt and Hesse. It’s too much to get into right now, but if you want to read more about it, see my blogpost from May 2020. https://lindstreet.blog/2020/05/21/german-states-and-provinces-as-of-1912-and-their-current-locations/.

 

Next week we’ll talk about finding those church records in the US.