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During your genealogy research, you may have the name of a place–for example, the town that your grandfather was born in–but you can’t find it on a contemporary map or map site.

Sometimes that’s because the name doesn’t exist anymore, but often it’s because most maps don’t have a comprehensive database of all existing place names. And sometimes, especially for names in foreign languages, you may have a spelling that isn’t the “standard” spelling.

A useful site for searching for any existing place name is the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) GeoNames Server (GNS), where you can search for any location anywhere in the world.

However, using the GNS has two disadvantages: it’s a bit complicated to navigate through, and you have to use a version of the name that’s close to the contemporary spelling of the place you’re searching for.

When you’re dealing with old names of the places your great-grandparents came from, you may not have that contemporary spelling, but rather some “morphed” version of the name that the GNS database won’t recognize. Although the GNS database has a “Fuzzy Search” option, it doesn’t always work for the various ways in which those names come down to us.

Using the ShtetlSeeker database on JewishGen

An alternative resource for finding these elusive old place names is the ShtetlSeeker database at JewishGen.org, which enables you to search for places in Central and Eastern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia, by name (exact or “Sounds Like” / Soundex) or location (by lat/long coordinates). (“Shtetl” means “a small town or village” in Yiddish.)

However, the ShtetlSeeker is not restricted to small towns; you can search for any place, large or small, in any of the above regions. It uses the NGS GeoNames Server, so it accesses the same comprehensive database of world place names, but the “Sounds Like” function (which uses the Daitch-Mokotoff Soundex) is more powerful and will often yield results when a search using the GNS fails.

You can use the JewishGen ShtetlSeeker even if you’re not signed in to the site (although it’s free to register and once registered you can search the private databases, as well). Here’s the direct link to the Communities databases:

http://www.jewishgen.org/Communities/

which will get you to the main Communities page. There are three clickable links on the page:

To use the ShtetlSeeker, first read the brief instructions and description of the links on this page — they’re clear and useful.

Then click the Search for places by name link, which is what you’ll use to search for any locality in “the 45 countries of Central and Eastern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia…based on the … Geographic Names databases.”

From the search screen, you can type in a town or other locality name–in whatever spelling that name has come down to you. If you know the modern country of the locality, you may choose to restrict the results by country, or just by region.

You can choose among the following search methods: Sounds Like, Is Exactly, Starts With, or Contains.

I searched for “Lapatzeva” in Belarus, using a Sounds Like search. This is the birthplace on a Petition for Naturalization of a person, born in 1883, for whom all other records have a different birthplace in what is now northern Belarus. So I was hoping to find something north of Minsk that would be close to the other known birthplace.

Either of the first two entries are worth further research and are on my To-Do list.

When I searched for “Lapatzeva” on the NGS site, even using their “Fuzzy Search” option, I got no results.

Using the results of your search

From this results page, you can click on various links in the table.

The most useful links if you’re not looking for specifically Jewish data are the links in the Maps column: E M U G (representing Expedia, MapQuest, MUltiMap, and Google Maps), which will take you to the map on each of these sites, showing where the town is located today. This, of course, will help you to identify other nearby towns, and also help you locate the town on your old map.

The other useful link is the 10 mile radius button in the far-right column, which will take you a long list of all towns within a ten-mile radius. This can be useful if you already have the names of other towns that you suspect may have been in the same neck of the woods; you can scan this list to look for these other familiar names.