Atlas des Deutschen Reichs
The Atlas des Deutschen Reichs (Atlas of the German Empire) was published in 1883 and is a valuable reference for identifying location names from the late 19th century in present times. Accompanying the atlas is a comprehensive gazetteer and a special feature of the maps is that churches are marked. The map covers a wide area around present day Germany.
The University of Wisconsin Madison library has a digitized version of the atlas on their web sites. Because of the detailed scale of the maps, the atlas is presented as about 40 images of 9 maps. It is easy enough to find a town in the index section which then references a map. For instance, Templin is listed as II G 7/8. It's on map 2 reference location G 7/8. Map 2 is broken up into 4 quadrants.
UW-Madison Atlas des Deutschen Reichs von Ludwig Ravenstein webpage
The traditional way to proceed would be to look up the map, find Templin, and at this point you get to see the geography around Templin, locate churches, and see what region it is in. Locating this town on a modern map can be a bit more difficult. In the case of Templin a modern map of the area will show it easy enough. But if you are like me and are not very familiar with the geography of Germany it can be difficult to place these towns in the overall context of the country. To help with this I decided to try and overlay these maps on Google Earth. I found this extremely useful, and have put the Place-marker Files needed to use these overlays on this web site.
How to use Google Earth with Atlas des Deutschen Reichs
First look up the index pages to find out what map you need.
Index Pages
Using the Templin example, click on "Stolzenberg, RB. Koslin - Tongelre". This a PDF file. If you do not have a PDF viewer you can download one for free from Adobe.
Now you need to locate the town on the map. You could do this by downloading the PDF copy of the map from the library website.
Down Load Maps
Or you could use the overlays below with Google Earth. First you need Google Earth installed on your computer. You can get it for free from the Google Earth Website.
At this point I should mention that the maps are quite large (8-10MB each). You should not try this over a dial up connection. You really need broadband internet access to use this method.
An overview of the maps can be seen on the library web site, which can help in understanding which part of Europe you will be looking at.
Map Overview
Once you know which map you need, click on the map link below, and find the town using the grid reference. Zoom in and get a close view of the town. Now for some more fun, right click over the map name in the list on the left of the application. Choose edit, and at the bottom of the window that pops up you can adjust the transparency to see the Google Earth underneath, including, hopefully, the town you are after. Care while in edit mode as you can move the map around by clicking and holding on the green lines.
 Map 1 |
Map 2 |
Map 3 |
| Map 4 |
Map 5 |
Map 6 |
| Map 7 |
Map 8 |
Map 9 |
Here are a few towns with well known names for people in the Fassifern/Rosewood Scrub areas.
This is a work in progress. It took longer than I expected to align the maps. There are errors due to the joins between pages, because of the projections used, and simple distortion of the paper. I've made a reasonable first attempt and will make fine adjustments as I find errors, or people report them.