It's been several months since we've posted a new old map to the
Gesher Galicia Map Room; we've been working on a new map data project
we hope to publish before the end of the year. But while that work
continues in the background, last week we assembled the central sheets
of a field sketch >from 1848 for an important Galician city:
Stanislawow, a.k.a. Stanislau, and today known as Ivano-Frankivsk.

https://maps.geshergalicia.org/cadastral/stanislawow-ivano-frankivsk-1848/

This is an early field sketch, very rough in its style and geographic
accuracy; to make sense of the sketch, we cut the scans into small
pieces and aligned them to an interwar map of the city, using
recognizable features on both maps to correct the sketch, then blended
edges to make a mostly seamless image. A few small areas on the old
map lack data and are left blank; in other places, the surveyor's
original sketches could not be pulled into alignment with the current
geography. But overall the old map is dense and informative, and the
vast majority of details are geographically close, if not exact.

Even if the map seems rough at first glance, a careful review will
give generous rewards. Like most field sketches, this map of
Stanislawow labels the buildings and fields with the house numbers of
the property owners, which means that anyone who has vital records

from the period can directly locate family houses and land without

needing property records as an intermediary tool. As a bonus, outside
the dense city center, many land parcels are annotated with the
landowners' names, so no other records are needed to directly identify
family properties. This benefit works for anyone with ancestry in the
city and its suburbs: Jewish, Ukrainian, Polish, etc.

Like some other large urban areas in Galicia, Stanislawow was divided
into numbered business and residential districts; the sketch does not
indicate these clearly, so it's easy to be confused when looking for
specific house numbers >from vital records and other data. The district
numbering for the city is generally indicated on a street map in the
GG Map Room:

https://maps.geshergalicia.org/general/ivano-frankivsk-stanislawow-1941/

...and on several of the maps >from the excellent collection in the
Urban Maps Digital project of the Center for Urban History of East
Central Europe, in Lviv:

http://www.lvivcenter.org/en/umd/location/ivano-frankivsk/

This historic paper map is preserved by the Central State Historical
Archives of Ukraine in Lviv (TsDIAL):
http://www.archives.gov.ua/Eng/Archives/ca04.php

The GG Map Room home page: https://maps.geshergalicia.org/

Jay Osborn
Gesher Galicia Digital Map Manager
Lviv, Ukraine
maps@...