A few weeks ago, Family Roots Publishing received the publication rights to Roger Minert’s excellent German Place Name Indexes. Eight are now in print in new editions from Family Roots Publishing. As of now, the German Place Name Indexes are all out-of-print with the original publisher, and Family Roots Publishing is preparing new editions of all 21 volumes. The new editions are the same as the earlier books, with minor editing of the contents and new covers.
I went to Utah last week and picked up every last copy of the earlier editions of Roger’s Place Name Indexes, and am blowing them out at my cost. This is in preparation for the 13 new editions to be published in August. These books are available today in VERY limited quantities (see quantities below). The sale price is just just $7.48 cents each. I will attempt to update these numbers in this blog post at Genealogyblog.com, and at the FRPC website as the books sell. Please do not order volumes that are marked as SOLD OUT, as we’ll just have to refund your money.
What really makes these Place Name Indexes stand out from a typical gazetteer is that they index the town both in alphabetical order and in reverse alphabetical order. Anyone who has done any research in the German parish registers has run across instances where they can read the last letters of a place (such as: place of birth, previous residence, place of marriage, etc.), but the first or letters are illegible, making the place-name impossible to decipher. Roger’s indexes take care of that problem.
The Reverse Alphabetical Indexes found in each volume allow the researcher to determine the name of a town when the first part of the name (whether one or more letters) is missing. This is a common problem caused by torn or moldy pages, ink-blots, tight bindings, poor microfilm quality, etc. By using these indexes, the researcher can also determine the official spelling for towns when variant spellings occur in old records. The book includes a regular alphabetical index of all the towns in the province as well as regular and reverse alphabetical listings of German kingdoms, duchies, principalities, counties, rivers, mountain ranges, and other geopolitical and topographical entities.
Click on the links for more information on a specific title and/or to order.
German Place Name Indexes: Identifying Place Names Using Alphabetical & Reverse Alphabetical Indexes
- Brandenburg Place Name Indexes – 20 copies in stock
- Hesse Place Name Indexes – Only 1 copy in stock
- Kingdom of Saxony Place Name Indexes – Only 6 copies in stock
