Researching old town names?

Question

I have two town names I'm attempting to research,

Zymeline Russia
Rolzatyn (Most likely Austria or Poland).

A simple internet search on Google or Yahoo returns no results. Any suggestions? I could easily get the info on my ancestors from Ancestry.com but I'm not forking over tons of money.

Answer 1

You're better off checking the various Mormon (LDS) resources for their "Locality Catalogs." They have indexed listings of former and modern location names, as well as references to documents that contain them. For example, during the days of the Prussian Empire, the modern city of Poznan, Poland was known as Posen. Modern Inowroclaw, Posen, was known as Hohensaltz. Murzynno was known as "Klein Morin". I found those in the Locality Catalog.

Start here:

www.familysearch.org

That's the Mormon genealogy web site. Look for either "Locality Catalog" or the location of a "family History Center" near you (they're in most cities.). If you can find a center, you can go there and examine their locality catalogs with help from the librarians.

Or, there may be a way to post a related query somewhere on their site.

Also, you've written those names using English characters. Their spelling in Russian would be written using Cyrllic characters. That may be why you didn't get any Google hits. If you could write them in Cyrllic, you might get better results.

Good luck!

PS: familysearch.org is a FREE site.