Marilyn Feingold <mrl@bellsouth.net> wrote:

In searching shtetl seeker I found the same town with at least six different
latitudes and longitudes, yet they are all in Moldova and have the same
name. What's happening? New borders? Which do I trust?Thanks for any
insight.

Sometimes there are different towns with the same name. This must make
things difficult for the post office. In some cases the towns are in
different provinces or counties, or might be distinguished in other
ways (one might be referred to as "Yehupetz near Chelm" as opposed to
"Yehupetz on the Bug"). But unfortunately our ancestors probably
didn't think it important to distinguish between these when putting
the name of their home-towns on official documents - they'd just say
they were >from "Yehupetz" and leave it at that. They didn't expect
anybody to ever use this information, at least not for any purpose
that would benefit _them_.

One other point to note: some of the places listed in the ShtetlSeeker
seem to be extremely tiny, while others of course were substantial
cities. If one of your locations doesn't appear on the Mapquest map
(except maybe if you zoom in at high magnification) while another
is prominently displayed, the prominent one is more likely to be
the place you're looking for. On the other hand, some of our
ancestors did live in very tiny villages.

Robert Israel
israel@math.ubc.ca
http://www.math.ubc.ca/~israel
Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2