Post by eggdog on Nov 24, 2022 3:46:03 GMT
I'm starting work on a concordance to postmarks in Poland. I'm able to get a list of what I think is the official towns (in the United States we'd call them "incorporated"). But what I'd really like is to create a database of:
First, I would like to know if something like this has already been done.
Assuming it hasn't: I can go scrape most of this out of Wikipedia, but if there's other sources that I could freely use, I'd like to know about them. Ideally, when this concordance gets into reasonable shape, I'd get a Creative Commons license and put it up where people can download it and even help edit it. That's why I said "freely use"; I don't want to step on somebody's copyrighted work.
One of the personal goals is to be able to locate cities and towns that have swapped countries through the years: like all those places that used to be in Prussia and are now in Poland, for instance. I like collecting postmarks from places with that kind of history. I like postmarks in general, though, and Poland is one of the relatively few places that still has accurate postmarks; letters that are mailed in a town of a thousand people are postmarked with the name of that town.
Any help, advice, encouragement, etc. will be welcomed.
- The name of the town/city.
- What woiwodeship it's in, and what powiat (state and county).
- Its jurisdiction in the late 19th century: Prussia, Austria, Russia....
- Alternative names: German, Russian, old names for places that were renamed in the last 100-150 years.
- (Ideally) Current population, or population scale (under 10,000; 10-50,000; 50-150,000; etc.)
- A free-form field for other notable changes in status; for instance, I learned that Białystok was transferred to the Belarusian SSR for a couple of years during WWII.
First, I would like to know if something like this has already been done.
Assuming it hasn't: I can go scrape most of this out of Wikipedia, but if there's other sources that I could freely use, I'd like to know about them. Ideally, when this concordance gets into reasonable shape, I'd get a Creative Commons license and put it up where people can download it and even help edit it. That's why I said "freely use"; I don't want to step on somebody's copyrighted work.
One of the personal goals is to be able to locate cities and towns that have swapped countries through the years: like all those places that used to be in Prussia and are now in Poland, for instance. I like collecting postmarks from places with that kind of history. I like postmarks in general, though, and Poland is one of the relatively few places that still has accurate postmarks; letters that are mailed in a town of a thousand people are postmarked with the name of that town.
Any help, advice, encouragement, etc. will be welcomed.
