Maps of German Empire -- Always Finding New Things Online

During our classes and FamilyHistoryExpos.com workshop in the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah this week, Ruth Maness, AG, showed us some old German maps on microfilm. Holly Hansen quickly located the maps online: Posselt-Landkarten. This turned out to be exactly the same maps as we were shown on the old Family History Library microfilm. The maps are high resolution, extremely detailed and are organized in collections by years beginning in 1782. The website is in German (of course) but by using Google Translate on the entire page, I can read the website in fairly good English.

Now if you have looked at a paper map with a magnifying glass or tried to read a map on a microfilm viewer, you can begin to appreciate this tremendous map collection. Here is a screenshot of the map viewer from 1782. 

Using the viewer, I can zoom in on any portion of the map.

Here is a list of the map collections:

• Map of the Empire of Germany from 1782
• Deutschlandkarte von 1813
• General-Karte von Europa 1845-1847
• Atlas des Deutschen Reichs von 1883
• Karte des Deutschen Reichs von 1907
• Monumentaler Plan von Breslan 1910
• Justus Perthes' Karte des Deutschen Reiches
• Karte des Deutschen Reiches

These are all on this one website. In addition, here are some more detailed maps on the same website:

• Map of the Kingdom of Saxony at a scale of 1: 240,000
• Lusetian Mountains and Ještěd Ridge 1: 100,000
• Summary sheets of maps of the German Reich at all scales Published by the Reich Office of recording Berlin.
• Information Sheet of the special map of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy 1: 75.000 and in scale 1: 75,000 existing overseas leaves Provided by Günter Ofner available.
• For the development of the map series "map of the German Reich" 1: 100,000

Here is a screenshot of the "Karte des Deutschen Reiches."

Here is a zoomed in view of one of the maps:

Here is a detail view from this same map:

Then I can zoom in to see the detail in this map:

No more blurry, half-readable images in a dark microfilm reader!

Wait, there is more. While Holly and I were clicking around looking for different copies of these maps, we found some of the same maps on the David Rumsey Map Collection:

These maps were linked to Google Earth and could be seen at magnification superimposed on a current satellite image. 

I am beginning to feel like a late night TV advertisement. Wait, there is still more.