In a message dated 3/19/2006 10:52:22 AM Mountain Standard Time, lindatherkela@msn.com writes: Some of the heimat books for certain areas have lists that show not only who lived where in 1945, but even where they are now (when the book was published). Some groups of villages were deported to specific places, and they still live in the places in Germany to which they were deported. When you look through some of the magazines of the German-Bohemians, you see reports from a number of specific towns in Germany -- because so many resettled there. ---------------- Linda's suggestion about using Heimat books as a cousin-search resource is right on the nail! There are two kinds of Heimatbuch. Some of them are history, culture and tradition. They will list all place names, maybe show a photo or two of each, and give a short history of the place. They might mention some key people from that place but they generally will not include a list of all residents' surnames. Some of those will have lists of WW I casualties and veterans which are as close as they come to providing lists of surnames associated with the place. Other Heimatbooks are "community" books for parishes, counties or other areas. They may have a general history of the parish (often includes a number of villages) or county covered in one section but their general organization is to have one or more pages dedicated to each place in the area covered. Some of them will have an "Ortsplan" (map of the place showing locations of house numbers) and lists of resident families in 11945 and others will not. Many of the Ortsplan found in these books are made from memory. For that reason they are incomplete -- they show only the houses that the map-maker remembers because German speaking families lived there. If there were Czech families in the place their houses may not be represented on the Ortsplan. When I wanted to find my cousins I used the Heimat book for the communities of Mies (Stribro) County. It is one of the books that includes names of residents. I already knew the place where my ancestors were born and looked at the 1945 list of residents there first. There were none with either surname I sought. So I started on page one of the book and went through every place listed looking for the surnames in each list of residents. I found one surname in about 3 places and the other in 5 places. Most of the places were within 25 km of my ancestral birthplace. When I sent out my letters I addressed each one specifically as looking for members of the family of or decendants of the name I found in the Heimatbuch. I was also careful to ask if they knew of any family ties to my ancestral house number 21 in Mariafels. Karen