There are a few books that would cover the subject in the World Catalog but the only one in English is available only at Oxford in UK. The others are all in German, Polish or Czech. There is one book about Austrian lands in general that may cover Silesia in a paragraph or page here and there. Whatever, it is a very interesting book even though it covers periods earlier than most of our ancestor's emigration. The methods described for 1848 pretty much continued to apply after that, in particular for smaller farmers. Farmers were slow to accept change and it could take a crisis to force change on them. Ëven after the emancipation mentioned in the book title below, many simply continued to do what they had always done. Except that now they owned their farms. Farming was perhaps the most important part of the Austrian economy until industrialization began in earnest. There may be books on the history of the economy of the Austrian lands that cover agriculture, too.. Noble landowners and agriculture in Austria, 1815-1848; a study in the origins of the peasant emancipation of 1848. Author: Blum, Jerome, 1913- Publication: Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press, 1948 English : Book Libraries Worldwide: 256 Karen In a message dated 2/27/2006 3:55:13 PM Mountain Standard Time, CWarschak@aol.com writes: My German ancestors lived in Austrian Silesia - just across the border from Poland. I have been doing genealogy for many years and have a considerable amount of knowledge of the atrocities suffered by the Germans in Czechoslovakia after World War II but I would like to know more about the everyday living conditions of Germans in the small rural villages of Austrian Silesia in the 1800s, as well as the circumstances that might have caused them to emigrate. (I am wondering if the living conditions experienced by my ancestors might have been comparable to the conditions experienced by the Poles in Prussian Silesia.) I have always been thankful that my direct ancestors made the decision to get on the ship and emigrate. I know that they experiences some real hardships in those first years but I'm sure that their hardships were much less severe than those suffered by their siblings who decided to stay.