Location over Time Help on FamilySearch
I met with Dan Jones from the FHL over Zoom about the Haub family from Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Although this session pertained to Germany, we had extra time so he showed me this gem.
www.familysearch.org/research/places
shows a timeline of the jurisdictional changes for cities. For example, we tried Prēsov, Slovakia (which is where hubby's maternal grandfather's family is from). And, tada! Since the city doesn't move, you've got a stable location which changes countries as history happens. This is a newer feature so it's not amazing, amazing yet...but it's still pretty darned amazing! Oh, and you also get the names in the language of the country in which the location was boundaried...so the name shows both the Slovak name *and* the Hungarian name. Yeehaw!
Basic Information:
Prešov (Slovak pronunciation: [ˈpreʂɔw] (listen), Hungarian: Eperjes, Rusyn and Ukrainian: Пряшів) is a city in Eastern Slovakia. It is the seat of administrative Prešov Region (Slovak: Prešovský kraj) and Šariš, as well as the historic Sáros County of the Kingdom of Hungary. With a population of approximately 90,000 for the city, and in total about 110,000 with the metropolitan area, it is the third-largest city in Slovakia. It belongs to the Košice-Prešov agglomeration and is the natural cultural, economic, transport and administrative center of the Šariš region. It lends its name to the Eperjes-Tokaj Hill-Chain which was considered as the geographic entity on the first map of Hungary from 1528. There are many tourist attractions in Prešov such as castles (e.g. Šariš Castle), pools and the old town.
Latitude, Longitude
48.9979, 21.2399
Additional Type Information
The Hungarian name Eperjes, Sáros, Hungary was used for this place before WWII.
You can sign up for a free research session using this link: https://go.oncehub.com/ResearchStrategySession
Comments
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(Eperjes went to Czechoslovakia after the first world war, not the second.)
Note that for most places that are now in one of the Kingdom of Hungary's successor states (such as Slovakia), the Places database does not (yet) have a connection established between the pre-Trianon and post-Trianon jurisdictions. The only link between the database entries is generally an alternate name. (Well, that, and the lattitude and longitude.)
For example, "Nagyrét, Zólyom, Hungary" has a single time period of "Unknown-1918", and is completely unconnected to the entry for "Veľká Lúka, Zvolen" (which has two time periods currently, one for Czechoslovakia with dates 1949-1960, and one for Slovakia with dates 1996-today). If it weren't for the Slovak name being entered as an alternate under the Hungarian jurisdiction, the one would not come up for the other in any search or placename entry.
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I should have written that this is a beta feature on FamilySearch and so there are major limitations to it at this point. But for those of us who struggle with Eastern European language and border changes, this is a help.
Thank you for clarifying what I overlooked in my initial post. Candidly, I have avoided doing Eastern European research since 1984 and handy (albeit currently incomplete) links like the above encourage me to at least try. And, truthfully, the only reason I decided to try is because my son died last year and I would like to leave his children (2 year old and 2 weeks old at the time of his death) the most accurate record of their family history that I can. I am encouraged that FamilySearch is in the process of rolling out this new feature for those of us who are not nearly as knowledgable as you are.
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