Announcing a new cartography website, "Historical Maps of the Hapsburg
Empire" or MAPIRE at:

http://mapire.staatsarchiv.at/en/

The site offers a selection of historical maps >from the Austro-Hungarian
Empire geo-referenced with present day maps (on Google or
OpenStreetMap) providing layering technology for researchers to compare
the past with the present.

Completed is the second military survey of Habsburg Empire and in
progress are the first and third surveys and cadastral surveys of Croatia
and Hungary. Project participants are the Austrian State Archives
(Osterreichisches Staatsarchiv) and Arcanum in Budapest.

There were two types of maps >from that time period: the military surveys
(typically scaled 1 to 28.800) and the more detailed cadastral maps
(scaled 1 to 2.880), with both of them covering the entire territory. The
original manuscript map sheets of the military surveys can be found
in the Austrian National Archives, but cadastral (extremely details
property maps on the town level) are found in various archives of the
successor states. For example, cadastral maps for the province of Galicia
are held the following regional or historical archives: Krakow, Przemsyl,
Rzeszow in Poland and Lviv and Ternopil in Ukraine. (Examples of
Galician cadastral maps can be found in Gesher Galicia's map room:
http://maps.geshergalicia.org)

To use the site, scroll down. When you see the passing selection of maps,
click "complete view" on one that interests you. You can also scroll further
and choose "Complete View" to see the entire Empire in context, or
choose to focus on the following territories:

Bohemia
Bukovina
Coastal Zone
Croatia
Dalmatia
Galicia
Illyria
Lichtenstein
Lombardy
Modena
Moravia
Parma
Silesia
Slavonia
Styria
Salzberg
Tyrol
Venice
Vorarlberg

Click on the area and then start zooming in. You can adjust the "opacity"
using the slider bar at the top of the page to switch views between the
historical map layered with the current GIS map. This feature is very
useful for those researching historical place names that may not show up
on current maps.

The Second (also known as Franciscan) Military Survey (1806-1809) has
outstanding quality and while not a cadastral survey, when you zoom in
at the closest range you will be able to view plots of land and buildings,
especially ones detailed along the banks of rivers that ran through these
communities.

Arcanum, based in Budapest, specializes in digitization projects, and has
already covered the entire collection of maps of the City Archives of
Budapest, the hand-written map collection of the Hungarian National
Library, and the cadastral maps of Hungarian Archives and Croatia.

A more thorough explanation of these maps can be found in the
"Digitized Maps of the Habsburg Empire" paper here:

http://mapire.staatsarchiv.at/static/pdf/mkf_booklet.pdf

Or the "Digitizing and Geo-Referencing of the Historical Cadastral Maps
(1856-60) of Hungary" here:

http://www.academia.edu/3614065/Digitizing_and_georeferencing_of_the_historical_cadastral_maps_1856-60_of_Hungary

[MODERATOR: Or http://tinyurl.com/Hung-maps1856-60 .]

The MAPIRE site is also available in German and Hungarian.

Pamela Weisberger
Gesher Galicia
pweisberger@...