I am new at searching for my ancestors from Germany because every time I started it was too daunting. The posts on this list are helpful but I'm nowhere near ready to look far. So far I have yet to find a starting point other than "Prussia" or "Hannover" or some other name that isn't a village or town. Will have to keep checking things out on this side of the ocean. However, I just read a post where someone is looking for a map earlier than the one they had. This isn't much earlier than that one but it's very interesting. Follow their instructions by looking for the proper index page first. I have a dial-up connection and the map section itself took a very long time to load. But it did finally come up. Good luck! _http://www.library.wisc.edu/etext/ravenstein/home.html_ (http://www.library.wisc.edu/etext/ravenstein/home.html) The Atlas des Deutschen Reichs by Ludwig Ravenstein is relatively rare in libraries of the United States. Memorial Library at the University of Wisconsin-Madison selected the 1883 copy in our collection as one of our first digitization projects because of its usefulness for genealogists. The atlas helps in tracing the roots of families with origins in any part of the German empire from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Besides Germany, the maps of this atlas also cover the bordering portions of present-day Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Hungary, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, the Russian Federation, Slovakia, and Switzerland. Due to the large scale of its maps (1:850,000) and its thorough gazetteer of place-names, one can locate even small towns and villages on the maps in the Ravenstein atlas. A special feature is the marking of the locations of churches on all of the maps as well as one special map with an accompanying table giving statistics on the religious denominations found throughout the German empire down to the Regierungsbezirk and Kreis governmental units. ************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com.