Villages, valleys, mountains and routes that help place family and history on the landscape.
Maps help connect surnames, churches, neighboring villages, migration routes and historical events. For descendants who know only a remembered village name, geography can be the bridge into the larger LEMKO.org archive.
Enter the original LEMKO.org map archive.
Use geography alongside family names, documents and oral history.
Connect mapped places with memories of the people who lived there.
See villages, churches and landscapes represented in the photo archive.
Religious buildings often provide enduring landmarks for village history.
Use maps together with documentary evidence preserved elsewhere on the site.
The valleys, roads, fields and mountains remain real places. Modern photographs can sit beside historical maps so visitors understand both the geography remembered by earlier generations and the landscape that exists today.
Record every spelling and language form of an ancestral village name before deciding two records refer to different places.
Use reminiscences to connect mapped locations with churches, roads, neighboring villages and local landmarks.
Compare historical maps with photographs of villages, churches and landscapes that survive today.
Maps can clarify wartime movement, migration and forced resettlement when read alongside historical evidence.
Record title, publisher, date, scale and source whenever possible; a map without provenance can be difficult to interpret.
Boundaries, labels and place names reflect the date and purpose for which a map was made.