Locating the old country

The Bremen lists record a home town for 547,056 of the emigrants established [bremenMigration] — but a town in a 19th-century list is only a string: “Breslau”, “Kowno”, “Neustadt”. To turn a name into a place — a point on a map, a modern country — you need a gazetteer. We used GeoNames, an openly-licensed database of place names, coordinates and their historical variants established [geoNames] , to resolve them. This is the origin-town resolver the whole arc has been pointing toward.

The home towns

The places the emigrants most often named as home:

• Berlin 24,049
• Bremen 14,498
• Hamburg 7,226
• München 6,767
• Wien · Austria 5,972
• Hannover 4,628
• Stuttgart 3,770
• Dresden 3,356
• Leipzig 3,331
• Essen 3,129
• Köln 2,738
• Budapest · Hungary 2,688
• Nürnberg 2,658
• Frankfurt 2,503
• Mannheim 2,230
• Düsseldorf 2,210

Big cities lead — Berlin far ahead, then Hamburg, Munich, Vienna, the industrial Rhine and Saxony — because a city is a name a clerk could spell and a person could give. The countless villages that most emigrants actually left are mostly too small to appear here at all.

The old country moved

Here is the resolver earning its keep. Some of the commonest home towns are no longer in Germany at all. After 1945 the borders shifted west, and cities that were part of the German Empire when these people left are now in Poland and Russia, under new names established [geoNames] :

• Breslau → Wrocław, Poland · 2,032 emigrants
• Danzig → Gdańsk, Poland · 960 emigrants
• Königsberg → Kaliningrad, Russia · 676 emigrants
• Stettin → Szczecin, Poland · 625 emigrants
• Liegnitz → Legnica, Poland · 185 emigrants
• Tilsit → Sovetsk, Russia · 151 emigrants
• Elbing → Elbląg, Poland · 147 emigrants

A descendant searching for an ancestor from Breslau will not find it on a modern map — it is Wrocław, in Poland; Danzig is Gdańsk; Königsberg, Kant’s city, is Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave. The gazetteer’s record of old names is the only thread back. This is the old country not as it is, but as it was — a country that no longer exists.

German names, foreign cities

A second, gentler border-crossing runs the other way. Because Bremen funnelled all of Central Europe, many home towns were never German — the emigrants simply wrote them in German: Wien (Vienna), Kopenhagen (Copenhagen), Prag (Prague), Bukarest (Bucharest), Temesvar (Timişoara), Kowno (Kaunas). Beyond the Germans came Austrians, Hungarians, Poles, Lithuanians and Romanians whose home cities were always their own probable [bremenMigration] — the reach of one German port across half a continent.

How the resolver works — and where it fails

The trick is the gazetteer’s alternate names: GeoNames files Wrocław under its modern name but keeps “Breslau” as a historical variant, so a fold-and-match on the old spelling finds the modern place. But be honest about the limits. Matching by name alone is fuzzy — dozens of German towns are called Neustadt, and we simply take the most populous Central-European match established [geoNames] , which is sometimes wrong. Towns under 5,000 people aren’t in this slice of the gazetteer, so most real villages never resolve; a handful of “home towns” are actually American cities (return voyages), which we drop. Every point on that map is a best guess, not a certainty — which is exactly how it should be read.

Stage 5 of 8 · The transatlantic arc

Sources

• [bremenMigration] “A Century of Migration” — a dataset of 735,545 emigrant records from the port of Bremen, 1830–1939 (from Bremen Society for Family Research / MAUS transcriptions; publ. MDPI Data), Zenodo doi:10.5281/zenodo.17977460. CC BY 4.0 (attribution required) · link
• [geoNames] GeoNames geographical database (geonames.org). CC BY 4.0 (attribution required) · link
• Home-town resolution, mapping and border-change detection computed by us (etl/german_origins.py) over the two open datasets.