Using the Austro-Hungarian 1910 High Resolution Maps
Greenwich and Ferro: Although today the most standard reference line of
longitude is that of 0° running through Greenwich England, it wasn't
always that way. In fact there were and are many different ones. The
maps in this set use zero degrees running through the town of Ferro in
the Canary Islands as was common in Europe at the turn of the century.
To convert from Greenwich to Ferro, one must add 17°40' the Greenwich
longitude. To convert from Ferro to Greenwich, you subtract 17°40' from
the Ferro longitude.
If your geography is pretty good, the following method works ok: click
on the Index Map. Locate the area of interest. For each square on the
map, there's a town/city name associated with it. It looks to me that
it is the Hungarian rendering of the name of largest city in that
square. For example, if I wanted to find the map that contained
Czernowitz, I would look around the area where I thought it to be on
the Index Map, and there you will find 'Csernyivci'. You can just click
on that square, and the map should start to become visible in your
browser.
Now, looking at the Index Map again: if you look all the way to the right along
the row that Csernyivci is in, you will see 48° -- that is the latitude
associated with the centre of the box. If you look up or down along the
column where the Csernyivci box is, you will see 44° -- the longitude
(east of Ferro in the Canary Islands) running through the middle of the
box. So the centre of the box has latitued/longitude 44-48, which not coincidentally, is the file name for this map: 44-48.jpg.
Here's another example, and probably reflects the way most of us would
use the maps. Suppose I were interested in the map that contained
my ancestral home of Podgaytsy or Podhajce Galicia which I know is at
49°16' N; 25°08' E (greenwich). Now the latitude is correct, but the
longitude 25°08' E of Greenwich must be corrected if we are to get to
the right map. We do this by noting that we must add 17°40' to the
Greenwich figure to get the Ferro figure. Thus the Ferro longitude for
Podhajce is (25+17)° (08+40)' or 42°48' East of Ferro.
Now if you've looked at some of these maps, you will have noted that
for any particular square, the longitude number runs through the CENTRE
of the square with half a degree on either side. Thus if we pick the
42-49 map (which seems logical), we will get a range from 41°30' - 42°
- 42°30' and we have missed our target of 42°48'. So, our target lies
on the next map to the right, the one that contains 42°30' - 43° -
43°30'. Thus we should look for map 43-49.jpg. Selecting this
map, we need to manually move through the map using the scroll bars (or the arrow keys) ,
looking for Podhajce and we find it right there at 49°16'N ; 42°48'E
(Ferro).
The website that these maps came from is: http://lazarus.elte.hu/hun/digkonyv/topo/3felmeres.htm
If you need maps other than those I've posted, you can go to the
website above and get them. As you can see in the table below the
Index Map, not all maps are available, as some were apparently never
published.
Finally, I was able to find the lat/long of some ot the towns in
Transnistria, Budy, Bar, Bershad, Shargorod, etc., using Google
Earth. Then I converted the longitude to Ferro, and I could
usually determine which map sheet I was looking for. If you do use this
method, make sure when you type in the the town in Google Earth you
type it as: TownName, Ukraine i.e., bar, ukraine otherswise
you will get maps of where all the bars are in Ukraine ;-)