Section 1. Searching and copying
- I’m certain that my village is in one of the completed regions, but I can’t find it. Why not?
- I see two or more versions of the place name I entered. Which one do I click on?
- Should I include the stuff [in brackets] when I copy the place name into my genealogy program?
Section 2: Scope of the data base
- Will the data base really cover the entire Holy Roman Empire?
- Why not have a uniform starting date for the data base?
- Why not go all the way to 1871, so that there is no gap between this website and Meyers?
Section 3: Country and nation naming conventions
- What is the difference between a country and a nation?
- Why not just call the nation “Germany”?
- The place I am looking for is within the Federal Republic of Germany. Why, then, does the nation name not at least include “Germany”?
- What’s with the parentheticals attached to certain fully-specified country names? Were they really part of the name?
Q1.1. I’m certain that my village is in one of the completed regions, but I can’t find it. Why not?
A. Two possible reasons:
- I may not have included the place name in the data base. I’m not being as comprehensive as Meyers Gazetteer (which covers the years between 1871 and 1918). A rule of thumb is that if it constituted its own Gemeinde in 1900, it is (or eventually will be) in the data base. (See Willkommen bei Gemeindeverzeichnis.de for a comprehensive data base of Gemeinden in 1900.) But there are exceptions. If you think I missed some place important, please let me know and I will consider adding it.
- The spelling may be different. The spelling of place names remained fluid even into the 20th century. For searchable cities and villages, I use the modern spelling. If your document contains a historical spelling, use Google Maps or Wikipedia to figure out the modern spelling. Here’s a good resource to guide you toward alternative spellings that might work. (Incidentally, I use the historical spelling for historical jurisdictions.)
Q1.2. I see two or more versions of the place name I entered. Which one do I click on?
A. If you see two place names that are exactly identical, that is an error on my part. Please let me know. I will try to add information that will help you to distinguish among them.
In many cases, places with common names have deliberately added information to the name to help you distinguish among them—particularly when they fall within the same jurisdiction. Sometimes, they will add a phrase describing its location. The phrase may start with “in,” “bei,” (near) or “vor” (in front of). Other times, they will add a parenthetical after their name (although that is a more modern practice). There are even cases of numbering the villages using Roman numerals. If your document does not contain any of those distinguishing features, I’m afraid I can’t be of much help.
But sometimes, particularly when the places with the same name are not geographically close, they just leave their names alone. So I have tried to add distinguishing information to help you–usually the name of the modern Gemeinde within which it falls. You can recognize my additions because they appear [in brackets]. With luck, you can match those additions to information in your document to help identify the right place.
Q1.3. Should I include the stuff [in brackets] when I copy the place name into my genealogy program?
A. No, and the bracketed information should not appear in the simplified results box that you can copy into your program. If bracketed information appears in that box, let me know and I will get it fixed.
Note that I don’t just use [brackets] to distinguish between villages of the same name. Sometimes, a village was under multiple jurisdictions. I some cases, I just picked the primary jurisdiction and went with that. In other cases, however, I created separate records for each jurisdiction within the village. I identify the jurisdiction type (ducal, ecclesiastical, imperial, institutional, etc.) [in brackets] and always end with a % sign to signal that the record represents just a portion of the village.
I use [brackets] for another reason too. After 1701, I recognize the Kingdom of Prussia at the nation level instead of Hohenzollern Germany. On the results page, it appears as [Kingdom of] Prussia. I do that to clarify that I am not referring to the Duchy of Prussia. But, unlike every other name used at the nation level, the entire name is not included in the simplified name. [Kingdom of] should not appear in the simplified results box.
Q2.1. Will the data base really cover the entire Holy Roman Empire?
A. Probably not. My goal is to cover as much as possible within the boundaries of the Federal Republic of Germany as of 2023. I estimate that will take ten years. If I do more, it will most likely be in Austria or the Netherlands, which present the fewest language barriers for me. I may also do Schleswig, which was outside of the Empire, because of its close relationship with Holstein, which was inside the Empire. I do not plan to publish a schedule of region releases.
Q2.2. Why not have a uniform starting date for the data base?
A. Every country has its own starting date. When selecting that date, I try to balance thoroughness with accuracy. I start by looking for a key date around 1500, because that’s when reliable genealogical data began to emerge. Frequently, that key date represents the extinction of a ruling line, or the beginning of the reign of a monarch who actively accumulated new territory. In more complicated cases, with countries splitting up and reuniting, sources frequently do not support starting the data base before 1600. But realistically, the pre-1700 data is more for the benefit of historians than genealogists anyway.
Q2.3. Why not go all the way to 1871, so that there is no gap between this website and Meyers?
A. Because I do not want to deal with the political questions raised by the era of French expansionism. The following summarizes how I determined when to cut off the data.
- Revolutionary France began invading German territory west of the Rhine in 1792. The French did not simply occupy the territory—they fully incorporated it in France. German-American genealogists have made it clear that they have no interest in recognizing the French annexations, so rather than spin my wheels documenting boundary changes that will be ignored by my users, I cut off the data in the year the annexations occurred.
- The Holy Roman Empire ended in 1806. Shortly thereafter, the French consolidated conquered Prussian territory and that of certain smaller countries into “model” client states that formed the core of the Confederation of the Rhine. Like the annexed territory, I don’t want to deal with the temporary boundary adjustments that occurred during this process, so I cut off the data in 1806.
- Some countries joined the Confederation without undergoing any boundary changes (or, in a few cases, never joined the Confederation). I extend the data beyond 1806 in such cases, cutting it off somewhat arbitrarily at the end of a key monarch’s reign (but no later than 1871, when the German Empire was founded). In such cases, I ignore the Confederation when constructing a place name.
Q3.1. What is the difference between a country and a nation?
A. In the real world (i.e., outside of this website), a country is defined by the reach of a government and a nation is defined by the reach of a culture. Here’s an explanation from people smarter than I am. (Note that the people smarter than me use the term “state” instead of “country.” They have their reasons, but I reserve the term “state” for subdivisions of countries, which is how I expect most of my users understand that term.) Anyway, by those definitions, Germany was not a country until 1871, but was a nation long before that.
The above definition of a country works well enough for me (although it still presents some challenges—see Q3.4). In fact, in the modern world, the country typically serves as the top level of a place name, so the distinction between country and nation is not important. That works because people have heard of most modern countries (at least European ones) and have a general idea of where they are. But most of the country names in the Holy Roman Empire are utterly unfamiliar to modern amateur genealogists. So some kind of higher-level name is needed so that people know roughly where a place is. I call that higher level a “nation” (but I’m open to alternatives).
Because my nations are artificial constructs, the naming thereof falls to me. I kept three goals in mind when doing so:
- Keeping the name as brief as possible,
- Ensuring that the name provides some geographic clarity, and
- Avoiding modern political implications.
With one major exception (the Kingdom of Prussia), I accomplished that with two-term names.
- A geography-neutral qualifier that groups together countries with some political commonality. That commonality could be a noble lineage—say Habsburg, Hohenzollern or Wittelsbach. Or it could be a similar relationship to the emperor, such as that of the imperial cities (Imperial) or the various abbacies, bishoprics, and archbishoprics (Ecclesiastical).
- A geographic descriptor that takes modern boundaries into account. In theory, the following descriptors will be available for nations in the Holy Roman Empire (but—after 1701—outside the Kingdom of Prussia):
- Netherlands—the northern remnants of the Burgundian state at its dissolution in 1477, plus adjacent ecclesiastical lands (note that this definition covers Belgium and Luxembourg as well as the modern Netherlands);
- France—countries that were primarily French-speaking that do not fall into another category;
- Switzerland—countries that had joined the Swiss Confederation (which remained part of the Empire until 1648);
- Italy—countries that were primarily Italian-speaking that do not fall into another category;
- Austria—countries in the Austrian Circle of the HRE, plus adjacent ecclesiastical lands (note that this definition includes Slovenia);
- Bohemia—countries claimed by the Bohemian crown (including, at times, territory belonging to modern Poland and Germany); and
- Germany—everything else (with the possible exception of Pomerania, which could be assigned to Poland prior to 1648). As a practical matter, “Germany” is the only descriptor you will see in the name of a nation for the foreseeable future.
Putting the two terms together yields nation names such as Hohenzollern Germany (before it became the Kingdom of Prussia), Habsburg Austria, Ecclesiastical Netherlands (for, say, the Bishopric of Liege), and Imperial France (for, say, the Imperial Cities of Metz, Toul, and Verdun before they were conquered by the Kingdom of France in 1552).
I classified the Kingdom of Prussia as a nation rather than a country for two reasons:
- Its size and administrative structure forced me to use the country level for the highest-level subdivisions (such as Brandenburg) that used to be countries themselves and which had subdivisions of their own that exhausted the four levels available to me; and
- It allowed me to sidestep the question about whether Prussian territory east of the Oder and Neisse Rivers should be given the geographic descriptor of Germany or Poland.
Q3.2. Why not just call the nation “Germany”?
A. As long as I’m working within the boundaries of the Federal Republic, I could probably get away with that. But I don’t want to paint myself into a corner if I, or a hypothetical successor, were to move beyond that. There are multiple definitions of “Germany” that I could apply and each has political implications. If I define the German nation in cultural terms, it could be seen as endorsing the expansionist policies of the Third Reich. If I limit the term “Germany” to the boundaries of the Federal Republic, on the other hand, it could be seen as implying that the boundaries of the German Empire were illegitimate at its founding. (For the record, I’m OK with using the term “Germany” for the German Empire between 1871 and 1918.)
A qualified nation name like “Wittelsbachian Germany” has a specific meaning in the context of the Holy Roman Empire—one that does not carry over to the modern world. “Germany” without qualification, in contrast, has no specific meaning in the context of the Holy Roman Empire and its meaning in the modern world depends on one’s politics (at least it has since 2014, when European boundaries—through no fault of the Federal Republic—suddenly became less fixed than they used to be). So I add the qualifier.
Q3.3. The place I am looking for is within the Federal Republic of Germany. Why, then, does the nation name not at least include “Germany”?
A. One of the rules I followed when constructing my “nations” was that each country would belong to exactly one nation (although the identity of that nation was not fixed across time). The definitions of specific nations (see Q3.1) implicitly take modern boundaries into account, but not with any precision. Thus, if a country in the HRE spanned the territory of two modern countries and those two countries were in different HRE nations, the selected nation would necessarily include territory in an unexpected modern country.
A good example of that phenomenon is the Duchy of Luxembourg. That Duchy was considerably larger than the modern Grand Duchy, including significant territory that is now part of the Federal Republic. But I would always assign the Duchy to a Netherlands nation. That decision should not be controversial—historians routinely do the same. Wikipedia, for example, places the Duchy in Habsburg Netherlands between 1482 and 1556, in the Spanish Netherlands between 1556 and 1714, and in the Austrian Netherlands between 1714 and 1797. (I would use the same nation names.) That means that the full simplified place name for what is now Pintesfeld, Arzfeld, Bitburg-Prüm, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany would have been, in 1700, Pintesfeld, Neuerburg, Vlanden, Luxembourg, Spanish Netherlands.
Habsburg territory in what is now southern Germany is another example. That highly-scattered territory was known collectively as Further Austria and so I would place it in the nation of Habsburg Austria. On the other hand, places outside of the Federal Republic could, under the right circumstances, be assigned to a German nation. For example, places in now-French Alsace generally met the criteria for being included in a German nation prior to 1648 (and even as late as 1681, when France finally asserted control over the entire region). Thus, I would place the city of Strasbourg in Imperial Germany during that period (but afterward in the Kingdom of France).
Q3.4. What’s with the parentheticals attached to certain fully-specified country names? Were they really part of the name?
A. No. The parentheticals are there to help explain how I came up with the simplified country names. There are three types of parentheticals:
- (in personal union with [another country]). It was not uncommon for two or more countries to have the same monarch, yet still be considered distinct countries. Such countries were said to be in “personal union”. Perhaps the best known example is found in the evolving relationship between England and Scotland. Prior to 1603, each had its own monarch; after 1707, they were joined as the Kingdom of Great Britain. But between 1603 and 1707, they had the same monarch, yet functioned as different countries—a personal union. When constructing simplified country and nation names, I handle personal unions in two different ways:
- If the two countries were both part of the Empire, I add the capital of the higher-status country to the name of the lower-status country. For example, after 1648, the County of Schaumburg was in personal union with the Landgraviate of Hesse-Kassel, so I gave it a simplified country name of “Schaumburg-Kassel”. The fully-specified country name spells that out as “County of Schaumburg (in personal union with Hesse-Kassel)”. The name of the higher-status country, however, makes no reference to the lower-status country, so Hesse-Kassel does not become Hesse-Kassel-Schaumburg.
- If one of the countries was outside the Empire, then I left the name of the inside country alone, but changed the nation name to reflect the outside country. Thus, because the Duke of Holstein (inside the Empire) and the King of Denmark (outside the Empire) were the same person, the simplified country name would just be “Holstein”, but I would assign it to the nation of “Danish Germany”. The fully-specified country name spells that out as “Duchy of Holstein (in personal union with Denmark)”.
- (adm. shared with [another country]). Areas in which two or more countries shared sovereignty and/or administrative responsibilities* are typically referred to as “condominia”. The best historical example that was both stable and relatively recent is that of the New Hebrides in the South Pacific. Prior to becoming the independent country of Vanuatu, it was ruled in a condominium between France and the United Kingdom for 74 years. Condominia were not particularly common in the Holy Roman Empire, but I still have to account for them. I do that by including the simplified country names of both countries, separated by a \. (The / character has a different meaning. Maybe some day, I’ll write an FAQ about it, but not today.) The order of the countries may or may not matter. The County of Lippe, for example, was party to three condominia and the name order significance was as follows:
- Schwalenberg (Lippe\Paderborn)—Lippe goes first because it was sovereign;
- Oldenburg (Paderborn\Lippe)—Lippe goes second because the Bishop of Paderborn was sovereign;
- Lippstadt (Lippe\Brandenburg)—Sovereignty was shared, but Lippe goes first because it held the earlier historical claim.
- (adm. [another country or outside party]. More common in the Empire than condominia were situations in which one country was sovereign, but someone who was not a subject of the sovereign ran the government. Such arrangements are extremely rare now—Guantanamo Bay (Cuban sovereignty, American administration) being the only example I can think of. Those arrangements went by a number of names—fiefs, pledges, leases, and so on. I can’t even list all of the different arrangement types, much less explain them. The bottom line is that there was frequently a bifurcation between sovereignty and administrative responsibilities*, and that presents a challenge when it comes to giving countries a simplified name. Here’s how I handle two different instances of this type of parenthetical with respect to Amt Winningen, over which the Bishop or Prince of Halberstadt exercised sovereignty:
- The administrator had a geographic base outside of the country. Hesse-Homburg, for example, was a distinct country between 1622 and 1806 (albeit not fully sovereign for most of that time). The Landgrave of Hesse-Homburg also administered Amt Winningen after 1663. I therefore give Winningen the simplified country name of “Halberstadt-Homberg” during that period. The fully-specified country name spells that out as “Principality of Halberstadt (adm. Hesse-Homburg)”.
- The administrator had no geographic base. The Count of Königsmark administered Amt Winningen between 1643 and 1663. Königsmark, however, had never been an independent country. The various counts of that name had possessions scattered throughout Brandenburg. The particular Count who administered Winningen was a military figure in the service of Sweden. He eventually administered the Swedish Duchies of Bremen and Verden, of which Stade was the capital. I therefore give Winningen the simplified country name of “Halberstadt-Stade” during that period. The fully-specified country name spells that out as “Principality of Halberstadt (adm. Count of Königsmark in Stade)”. (If I had been unable to identify an administrative headquarters such as Stade, I would have gone with “Halberstadt-Königsmark)”.
* “Administrative responsibilities” is modern term that I am applying very loosely (and anachronistically) to the Empire because the precise details of the administrative arrangements are just too much for me to wrap my head around while keeping the project moving forward. The term has the unfortunate connotation of implying some kind of burden. That is not the way to think of it. Administrators also collected the taxes and otherwise exploited the local peasantry. They were running the show and generally made out very well. They just couldn’t raise armies in opposition to the sovereign and usually had to pay some form of tribute. I am open to alternative terminology, but it would have to apply just as loosely as this one.