GOV – Historic Geo Information System
Source of data
For research purposes, the CompGen association offers the project database “GOV - Geschichtliches Orts-Verzeichnis” project database. GOV should develop over time into an aid for genealogists, historians and other scientists, which allows standardized access to a wide range of location-related data, in particular to information that is important for the work of the genealogist. The GOV includes churches, church districts, towns, counties, regions. CompGen offers a compact extract of the information contained in the GOV as a download ”Mini-GOV”. On this basis, FamGEN has created local registers and uses exclusively data from the GOV of the Association for Computer Genealogy Computergenealogie e. V. in the version of 20.02.2022.
Municipalities, localities and parishes
GOV databases
The GOV datasets can essentially be divided into municipalities, localities and parishes. The term municipality, or more precisely political municipality (also commune), refers to territorial bodies (territorial and sovereign public law bodies), which usually represent the smallest spatial-administrative, i.e. political-geographical administrative unit in the public administrative structure of states (source: Wikipedia). Settlements, places or localities where people have settled and live together for the purpose of living and working are administratively subordinated to a municipality. These can be, for example, residential areas, farms, groups of houses, scattered settlements or forester's houses. And parish refers to a parish district (parochie) in which several villages are assigned to a particular parish church and its pastor.
Information on municipalities, location and parishes can be called up individually in GOV. To do this, the user first enters a place name (e.g. Sehestedt) and then the search results are listed in a table, from which he can call up an object type of his choice. In this example, all superordinate objects of the municipality of Sehestedt are displayed.
A second possibility is offered by FamGEN, in which the GOV total holdings are recorded regionally in municipalities, location and church registers and each entry offers several buttons with the help of which specific maps, GOV or Meyers Gazetteer descriptions of each data record can be called up.
