Gazetteer of the Crownlands and Territories
Represented in the Imperial Council of Austro-Hungary
(Gemeindelexikon der im Reichsrate vertretenen Königreiche und Länder)

A gazetteer is a geographical dictionary of places and where they are located. If you know the name of your ancestral village this gazetteer will assist you to find its location.

This 14 volume gazetteer was published in German between 1903 & 1908. This gazetteer contains valuable information like population, area, religion, native language, livestock, buildings, etc for most of the villages and towns in the Austro-Hungarian territories of Galizien, Bukowina & Dalmatien.

It is available online at Familysearch by clicking here where it can be viewed from your home a page at a time or downloaded as a massive 308 MB pdf file .   It is on digitized microfilm #1187928. 

Volume 12 (1033 pages on Galizien) is available online, one page at a time, courtesy of the genealogy.net digital library (DigiBib).

 

Due to its importance, we have six aids to help you get the most from this gazetteer:

    1. Past president, Dave Gorz, has extracted the alphabetical index of all villages in the book. This index (pages 956 to 1017 in the book) has a list of all villages giving page numbers where village information is found. Note: Page numbers given in these book index pages do not match the page numbers used on the web page. For example this:  reference for the village of Bedrykowce in the index directs you to book page number 760. To view page 760 in the Gemeindelexikon book you will need to choose page 769 in the "Gehe zu Seite" (Go to page) drop down menu on the Gemeindelexikon web page or FamilySearch download. (In other words, add 9 to any book page to get the page number to use on the website or PDF.)

    2. For convenience the 62 index pages have been broken into groups of pages of villages with the given first letters. GGD Members can click on the links below to view or download them.

      Gemeindelexikon Index of Villages (all in PDF format) lock icon

      Village names starting with:
      The letters A & B (2.9MB) The letters C & D (2.4 MB) The letters E, F, G, H & I (2.8 MB)
      The letters J & K (3.2 MB) The letter L (2.0 MB) The letter M (1.6 MB)
      The letters N & O (2.0 MB) The letter P (3.3 MB) The letters R & S (3.7 MB)
      The letters T, U, V & W (2.8 MB) The letter Z (3.1 MB)  

       

    3. If you know the current Ukrainian name for the village, and the village is in the Lviv oblast, there is a handy census database that gives the same information as the Gemeindelexikon when you click on the link opposite the Ukrainian name. It is provided by the Alberta-Ukraine Genealogical Project which has a Family History Portal financed by the Alberta government located at sites.ualberta.ca/~ukrville/ This makes the whole process much easier since it is all in English and very clear for the over 3,500 Ukrainian villages listed, only some of which have German roots.  See sample for Machliniec.

    4. The good folks at HALGAL (Genealogy of Halychyna / Eastern Galicia) have made available information on how to use this gazetteer including abbreviations used and column headers. The HALGAL Information page is available by clicking this link.

    5. Member Dave Gorz has created a finding aid to complement the information available on HALGAL. It has maps and tables to help you locate the administrative district of your village, an index showing on which pages each district will be found in the gazetteer and an index to the gazetteer's Appendix. Dave's Finding Aid is available by clicking this link.

    6. Dave Gorz has created a guide to Using the Gemeindelexikon which gives step by step instructions on how to use the above resources.
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