Adventures and Lessons in Finding Julius Bolda's Origins, Post 2

Ok, so now that I've thoroughly stressed that you're going to need some kind of guide to help you navigate the Meyers Orts Gazetteer of the German Empire for the first time, I can show you why. First though, there was no entry found for a Grossrudorf, so what we found was for Grossendorf:

So we can see 6 entries for Grossendorf on this page (there were also two others shown on the following page but neither of those were in the right area to be the correct location). Each of the different locations was designated numerically. Following that number, there is an abbreviation which specifies what the location is categorized as. For instance, the first possible option with the name Grossendorf has a D. When we check with the family search appendix we see that "D." is the designation for a dorf, or village in English. Next, is the location abbreviation and various information regarding kingdoms and duchies. With this information you can narrow down where the most likely place with this name was located and then compare that to a modern map.

However, I got some excellent advice from a couple of German and Polish specialists including Stephen Danko, who maintains a blog at http://stephendanko.com/. He pulled a handy dandy Polish gazetteer and managed to narrow things down even more and found the Polish name and current name for entry number 5 from Meyers Orts. This Grossendorf is in modern-day Poland and is currently known as Wladyslawowo in the area of Puck. At the time, this information didn't hit me particularly hard but soon enough I had reason to think I had a good lead on this.

Probably should move on to Post 3 now...I told you there was a lot to talk about! :)