This page is a very long central page, but that is better than splitting it into several small scattered pages.

Please click on chapters of the following selection list, to read their information.

• General Overview on the CD:   The Announcement Text
   
• Representation of German Special Characters:
  • How do I type 'ä', 'ö', 'ü', 'Ä', 'Ö', 'Ü', and 'ß' ?
  • Can I type also the Egerländer Symbolic Dialect Letters 'å' and 'Å' ?
     
• Representation of Czech Special Characters on this CD
   
• Translation of Abbreviations from the Book "Sudetendeutsches Ortsnamenverzeichnis"
  (Sudeten German Gazetteer)
   
• Where are the Egerländer Dialect Audio Samples?
   
• Basic Instruction on how to use the CD's text search program
   

Title
   Heimatkundliche CD zum Egerland
   (Local Historical CD of the Egerland)

   Note:
   The Egerland is a section of West Bohemia, today the most
   western part of the Czech Republic. It was once included in
   all the borderlands of Bohemia that were called Sudetenland
   because the population was over 95% German-speaking.
   The Egerland got its name from the City of Eger.

Preparation, Coding, Supply and Copyright
   Ewald Keil, Asternweg 13, 70794 Filderstadt, Germany.

ISBN
   (n/a)

Medium
   1 CD-ROM (650 MB, in plastic container)

Contents

   A. Three books

      1. Gedenkbuch der Gemeinde Schönau
         (Chronicle of the Community of Schönau)

      2. Zur Geschichte der Bauernhöfe und Familien auf den
         Dörfern der ehemaligen Stift Tepler Herrschaft.
         Die Dörfer des Witschiner Kirchspiels
         (On the History of Farmsteads and Families in the
         Villages within the Former Dominion of the Monastery of
         Tepl. The Villages of parish Witschin)

      3. Sudetendeutsches Ortsnamenverzeichnis
         (Sudeten German Gazetteer)

      Enhanced with complementary text, graphics, and audio
      samples.
      HTML format ready to view and print from any web browser.
      It is not necessary to be on line to use the CD.
      The CD's HTML format enables the user to page forward and
      backward, to display referenced pages, to jump directly to
      the table of contents, or to jump from the table of
      contents to any page listed there, with a single click of
      the mouse.

   B. A user-friendly search program

      Understanding German and English, dedicated for this CD,
      able to search on each word (e.g. a name) or number (e.g.
      a year or house number), or even a part of each word or
      number, within each of the three books.
      When you want to search for a word containing German
      special characters, you will have to specify these
      characters as written in the book. The CD includes simple
      instructions that tell the user how to type the German
      special characters if needed for a search word.
      The program may be used under native DOS, and also in the
      DOS emulation ("DOS window") of other operating systems
      (e.g. under Windows3/95/98/NT/...).

Cost of the CD  (as of December 2000)
   -  Subject to change without notice.
   -  Advance payment.
   -  VAT n/a.
   CD:       DM 50.--  or  $ 25.--
   Shipping:
             DM  4.--  or  $  2.--  within Germany
             DM  9.--  or  $  4.50  surface mail outside Germany
             DM 17.--  or  $  8.50  air     mail outside Germany

IMPORTANT NOTE:
All texts on the CD are exclusively in German.
No English translation available, so far.


1. Gedenkbuch der Gemeinde Schönau
   (Chronicle of the Community of Schönau)

A complete chronicle of Schönau, a village in the Luditz
district in the Egerland. The scope of history covered reaches
from pre-history when the area was first settled up to 1939. A
chronicler began the book in 1926 to commemorate Schönau's 600th
anniversary. After 1931 a new chronicler kept the record until
1939.

The original hand-written chronicle includes approx. 400 pages
(16.5" x 11.6") in "Kurrent" (the old German hand-writing), plus
about 50 more pages containing photos, drawings, and original
documents.

The reader of the CD has available all of the book's pages in two
qualities:
 (1) graphically (like photocopies), to view and print the
     original hand-writing, photos, and documents,
 (2) without copies of the photos, but all text transcribed into
     modern print fonts, in order to enable younger and future
     generations to understand the book.

Complementary pages include: a table of contents (missing in the
original book), a small glossary, instruction to find the
location and present roads to Schönau, indexes of church
registers and land title registers, audio examples of dialect
spoken with the "flavor of Schönau", some of which quote
passages of the book, and other information.

You may jump from the graphic ("photocopy") pages to the
transcribed text pages, and back, by mouse-click.


2. Zur Geschichte der Bauernhöfe und Familien auf den Dörfern der
   ehemaligen Stift Tepler Herrschaft.
   Die Dörfer des Witschiner Kirchspiels
   (On the History of Farmsteads and Families in the Villages
   Within the Former Dominion of the Monastery of Tepl.
   The Villages of parish Witschin)
   By Dr. Benedikt Brandl, 1925.

This out-of-print book was published as pages 359-405 of a larger
commemorative work.

The copy is published on this CD with permission from the Tepl
Monastery.

The CD version has added enhancements to the original: a table of
contents, instruction to find the location and present roads to
Witschin, the complete index of the Witschin parish church
registers, and information about the Tepl Monastery.

This book is a significant source for historical and
genealogical data about Witschin and its vicinity. It includes
the names of each succeeding landholder or owner of a farmstead
or house in the parish of Witschin, as far back as records are
available. It also contains other information of particular
interest to genealogists.


3. Sudetendeutsches Ortsnamenverzeichnis
   (Sudeten German Gazetteer)
   2nd. edition, 1987.

More than 370 pages, plus map appendix (5 original maps).

The second edition of the book is sold out, and there are no
plans to publish it in hard copy again.

The CD copy is published with permission of the Sudeten Archive,
Munich.

Among all gazetteers, only the "Sudetendeutsches
Ortsnamenverzeichnis" provides the exact "transition rules" for
the transition from the pre-1938 administrative organization
formed by political and judicial districts ("Politische Bezirke"
und "Gerichtsbezirke") into the subsequent administrative
organization formed by city and rural districts ("Stadtkreise und
Landkreise") after 1938.

Details in individual entries include both the German and Czech
names and descriptions of the "Politische" and "Gerichtsbezirke",
of the  "Reichsgaue", "Regierungsbezirke" and "Kreise".
Individual places (cities, towns and villages) are listed with
both Czech and German names.  The entries include places that
have disappeared since 1945 as well as places that still exist,
along with some details (surface and inhabitants) about each
place at different points in time.

The CD version provides a copy of one of the maps with a grid
overlay that matches grid coordinates given in a corresponding
list of names of "Politische Bezirke" (often identical with the
names of a subsequent "Kreis"). The grid simplifies locating each
district on the map, improving somewhat on the original.

If you want to search for an exact text string containing German special characters (like e.g. the place name of Schönau), you must enter this search string to the search program exactly as it is written in the text, including the German special character 'ö'. Do not type 'oe' instead of 'ö'. It would not yield any matches for appearances of "Schönau".

There are seven German special characters:   'ä',   'ö',   'ü',   'Ä',   'Ö',   'Ü',   and   'ß'  .

• 'ß'   is a special 's', and it sounds like a voiceless 's'.
• The other six are vowel special characters, with diacritic dots above them, and they do not sound like their "base" vowel (without the diacritic dots). For having changed their basic character sound, those 6 vowel special characters, in German, are called "Umlaute", which simply means something like "changed sounds" or "modified sounds".
  (The singular is "Umlaut".)

Now, your legitimate question may be:

If you have a US International Keyboard, you can generate the German special characters by pressing a more or less complicated combination of keys. I was told that depressing the quote-key (") and then one of the vowel keys (a, o, u, A, O, or U) yields the Umlaut of the vowel. If you have that keyboard, you might have the corresponding instruction, too.

If you can emulate the German Standard Keyboard (by pressing e.g. Alt + Shift, with the software supporting this keyboard), then you are able to type the above seven special characters by one key stroke, each.

A good general solution for all keyboards is the following:

• depress the Alt key while
• keying the number of the special character (according to the ASCII 8-bit character table), on the numeric pad at the right side of your keyboard.

    'ä'    is generated by   Alt + 132
    'ö'    is generated by   Alt + 148
    'ü'    is generated by   Alt + 129
    'Ä'    is generated by   Alt + 142
    'Ö'    is generated by   Alt + 153
    'Ü'    is generated by   Alt + 154
    'ß'    is generated by   Alt + 225

But if you use keying combinations including the Ctrl or Shift keys, with a web browser, you might as well evoke an unwelcome web browser command, instead of generating a character display!
 

For a general keyboard, this means:

    'å'    is generated by   Alt + 134
    'Å'    is generated by   Alt + 143

In the "Gedenkbuch der Gemeinde Schönau", there is a page with the same dialect word written in 3 different variants!
 

As the gazetteer on the CD uses German and Czech special characters even in the same line, I had to use a different and unsatisfactory approach, and in order to keep consistency, simplicity, and usability for all of the web pages on the CD, I used it throughout.
It is the way of coding you will find in many web pages of non-Czech authors, including the "German Genealogy Pages". It needs some time to get used to it, but it is a simple viable solution (although Czechs possibly won't like it).

Please read this information carefully.
 
All Czech basic characters (i.e. without diacritic additions) also exist in the German basic character set.
A Czech special character consists of a Czech basic character plus a Czech diacritic addition. None of the Czech diacritic additions is used for German characters. Hence, none of the Czech special characters exists in the German character set.

The Czech diacritic addition can be

• an accent sign, equal to the French "accent aigu", but it may appear above each of the vowels a, A, e, E, i, I, o, O, u, U, y, or Y. This accent extends the duration of the vowel sound (and possibly puts a secondary stress on its location within the word).
  Sample: á
• a small circle above the vowels u or U. Extends the duration of the vowel (and possibly puts a secondary stress on its location within the word).
• a seldom high-positioned comma (similar to the apostrophe), but not as a separate character, rather part of its base character, which may be each of the characters   d   or   t  . Modifies the pronunciation by adding to it a gliding sound similar to the American 'y' after 'd', like in 'Goodyear'.
• a small hook with its tip down (like a small 'v' or a reverse French "accent circonflexe").
  • Above a   D   or   T   (both are rare!), it has the same pronunciation effect as with   d   or   t   with subsequent high-positioned comma.
  • Above the base characters c, C, e, n, N, r, R, s, S, z, or Z, in part it modifies the pronunciation of the base character considerably.
  
  (Apart from that, in Czech dictionaries, the following sorting sequence applies for special characters with the diacritic v-hook:
  With c, C, r, R, s, S, z, and Z, the character without a v-hook alway precedes the same character with the hook.)

For the technical reasons stated above, and in order to avoid problems for the user (e.g. when working with the CD's text search program), an incomplete representation of the Czech special characters is used throughout this CD.
In Czech words on web page texts, I (normally) ignore all diacritic signs apart from the small v-hook above the characters c, C, D, e, n, N, r, R, s, S, T, z, or Z.
 
But the story goes on ...
There is not even a general and satisfatory solution (not yet) to represent the diacritic v-hook. To write the upside-down v-hook I use ASCII character 94, the French "accent circonflexe" (^) found on all current keyboards. Unfortunately, for current HTML implementations, I have to write it after the character, above which it is located in Czech original text.
 

If you know a bit of German, have a look to the dialect information page, or directly to its chapter Übersicht und Aufruf für die einzelnen Klangbeispiele auf diesem CD-Teil. This chapter contains the references (= links) to playing the audio samples. The samples are in files with a filename extension of ".wav", and you will recognize the links to audio samples by the link text showing a filename ending in ".wav".

Clicking on one of the links to a "wav" file will load the sound file in order to start the playing that sample -- provided that your sound equipment is on and ready, and that your web browser supports "wav" files.

After the mouse click, and depending on the type of web browser you are using, a small window with a current set of audio device controls ("play", "pause", and "stop" button, and also a volume control) should appear on the displayed web page. You may handle the controls clicking on them or changing them as you like.

An example (taken from the above indicated chapter) follows. You may start this audio example right from here, by clicking on its following "wav" filename \ggs\taanna.wav. It is the largest of my sound files (40 MB), and it may need some seconds to load. Its duration is 30 minutes, but you may stop it at any time.
After finishing with the example, please close the small window containing the sound controls.
 

Its name is TXTFNDR, derived from the word TEXTFINDER by omitting the 3 vowels.
(By-the-way: TEXTFINDER is a word which means exactly the same thing to German and English readers, although they pronounce the I vowel in a different way.)

TXTFNDR is written for a Turbo Pascal compiler and virus checked (as of 03 October 2000). You will find it on the CD as file 'txtfndr.exe', in the CD root directory, and also in the directory of each of the 3 books (which are directories \dkw , \ggs , and \sov ). You may run it from any of these CD directories. But if you know how to do it, you may as well copy 'txtfndr.exe' from CD to one of your user directories on your harddisk (which does not yet contain a different program with the same name of 'txtfndr.exe') and run it from there.

You must start TXTFNDR under DOS or DOS emulation. Under the different versions of Windows3/95/98 etc., DOS emulation is also called "DOS window" (meaning "a window to DOS") or "MS DOS prompt". There are other operating systems, like OS/2, or possibly MAC OS and UNIX family versions, which offer DOS emulation, too.

To get a DOS emulation window under Windows, you may use the following steps:

• click on the Windows Start icon
• in the now opening selection window, click on Programs
• in the now opening selection window, click on MS DOS prompt
• the now opening window is the "DOS (emulation) window", which you should have in, or change to, an adequately large size
• this is the window where you can start TXTFNDR.

If your DOS window's current directory (indicated normally at the start of the line where you can enter data from the keyboard) already contains 'txtfndr.exe' among its programs, you are in a good starting position, already.
If you don't know whether 'txtfndr.exe' is there, you may change to the CD drive's root directory. Assuming your drive containing the CD is on X:, you enter (i.e. typing in the DOS window, and pressing ENTER when finished):

x:

The start command for a German dialog with the program is simply 'txtfndr', but if you want to have an English dialog, your (first) program start parameter must be an 'e' (for 'E'nglish).

To start English TXTFNDR, type (in upper or lower case, as you prefer, and with at least one blank between the program name 'txtfndr' and the parameter 'e'):

txtfndr  e

The following (prompting) dialog is self-explanatory. TXTFNDR will guide you smoothly by a simple short dialog, asking you on the DOS window's screen, and you enter your answers to TXTFNDR to the same DOS window.

IMPORTANT:   If you don't understand one of the "short-hand" prompts, press the question mark key ? to request more details.

ALSO IMPORTANT:   If you get completely lost or confused, and you want to abort the run of TXTFNDR immediately, you

• press the BREAK key while pressing the CONTROL (= CTRL, = CTL) key
  or
• click on the X in the DOS windows upper right corner, and when asked subsequently, request the DOS window to be closed unconditionally.

After an input which definitely never can be other than a single character (like 'y' for 'yes'), do not press the ENTER key.

TXTFNDR's help text is in blue color, TXTFNDR's acknowledgements to your input are in yellow.

TXTFNDR needs some information from you for his work. He writes his questions to you on the DOS window. They are normal text questions and refer to:

1. The book section you want to search through.
   (No ENTER key to be pressed!)
    
   • Pressing s will tell TXTFNDR that you want to search in the "Sudetendeutsches Ortsnamenverzeichnis", i.e. the Sudeten German gazetteer
      
   • Pressing g leads to the "Chronicle of the Community of Schönau"
      
   • Pressing d to "The Villages of parish Witschin".
      
   (The selection letters 's', 'g', and 'd' are the initial letters of the German titles.)
    
2. The drive your CD is in.
   (No ENTER key to be pressed!)

   If your CD drive is X: , then type X , without the colon, and without the ENTER key.

3. The range of book pages you want to search through.

   Some of the additional pages (they are not part of the original hardware book!) will always be searched. You cannot exclude them from search, but you cannot include them explicitely, either.

   Pressing the * key (without the ENTER key!) means: "all pages of the book".

   If you enter an explicit start page number and end page number for the search, you have to press the ENTER key after each, because TXTFNDR does not know if your page numbers will be 1, 2 or 3 etc. digits long.

4. The character string you want to search in the book pages just specified.
   (ENTER key required!)

   It may have from 2 to 16 characters, with no intervening blanks.
   Type it in and finish with the ENTER key.

   ATTENTION: here, the case of the input characters may be important!

   Let us assume you want to search for the place name Schönau. You don't have to specify the complete word, you may also enter only a part of the word, e.g. höna (with the correct German special character ö, as learned in previous chapters!).
   Yet, if there are other words in the pages to be searched, which also contain the string höna, you will get them as matches, too.

   Let us assume a second case, where you want to search for the Czech place name of Schönau, which is C^inov. Wenn entering this name, you might run into problems with the '^' followed by an 'i', at least when you use a computer working with German (or European) keyboard and language support. If you enter it, your operating system possibly might contract both characters to a single one, which is ' î '. In order to avoid the contraction, enter '^', then an empty space ' ', and only then the 'i'.

5. Whether to search
    
   
   • also for other upper/lower case spellings (in case of search string HÖNA, e.g. search also for hÖnA, etc.), which may be useful if you do not know whether the searched word appears only in lower-case, or also with a capital letter in the first position, or also all in upper-case,
     or
      
   • only the the specified search string exactly as you entered it.
      
   The first option will give you all possible upper/lower case variants which may be found, but the reported matching lines' contents will all be written in uppercase, to remind you that you selected "any case".
   Press y (without the ENTER key!), if you really want all variants.

6. The desired format of your resulting report file.
   (No ENTER key to be pressed!)

   You may request:
    

   • Either a simple ASCII text file (can be edited by any simple ASCII text editor, e.g. by Windows' WordPad).
     If yes, press the t key (without the ENTER key!).
     Explanation follows below.

     ATTENTION with the editor you use:
     WordPad works ok, but there are (ASCII) text editors which are "too smart". Let's consider, as an example, the Czech name of the village Schönau, which is C^inov (remember the above main chapter on how to write Czech characters?).

     There are editors which do not simply edit the character sequence of this Czech name as found in the file, namely 'C^inov'. It's because they know that pressing the '^' key and then the 'i' (or any other lower-case vowel) key usually means, that the user wants to write French -- in this case an 'i' with an 'accent circonflexe' ( î ). So, if this smart editor edits the word 'C^inov', it also changes it to 'Cînov', and that is not what we want.
      

   • Or a HTML file (to be edited by the web browser).
     If yes, press the h key (without the ENTER key!).
     Explanation follows below.

   Both output file forms contain the same information concerning the matches found, but the use of the two forms is different.

   Following are 2 short samples, both with the same 2 matching lines for 3 matches (no. 192 ... 194) in 2 pages, extracted from TXTFNDR's two different output file types.
    
   

   1. ASCII text file partial output after searching for Schönau with option "any case", in the gazetteer:
       

      107. Page 300 (File X:\sov\s0300.htm): ----------------------------------------- 193(2x). SCHÖNAU SCHÖNAU LUDITZ C^INOV 108. Page 303 (File X:\sov\s0303.htm): ----------------------------------------- 194(1x). C^INOV KARLOVY VARY SCHÖNAU

      
       
   2. HTML file partial output after searching for Schönau with option "exact case", in the gazetteer:
       

      107. Page 300 (File X:\sov\s0300.htm): 193(2x). Schönau Schönau Luditz C^inov 108. Page 303 (File X:\sov\s0303.htm): 194(1x). C^inov Karlovy Vary Schönau

       
      
   Let us compare the first line of both output file types.

   107 is the sequence number of matching pages, i.e. page 300 is matching-page no. 107.
   The (HTML-)file containing page 300 is file X:\sov\s0300.htm (assume, the CD drive being X:).

   In case 1 (= text output file), make your web browser display file:///X:/sov/s0300.htm by entering this file specification in the appropriate browser input field.

   In case 2 (= HTML output file), simply click on reference Page 300 and display that page immediately.

   Which case would you prefer?

   When your web browser displays page 300, you would execute an "Edit" - "Find-in-page (not case-sensitive)" for all the strings 'Schönau', on this page.

   Two additional remarks:

   • All the pages of all books an the CD have a filename of 'sxxxx.htm', where xxxx is the 4-digit page number with leading zeros.
   • The number 193 (and 194, resp.) in the second line is the global match count. The subsequent '(2x)' indicates the number of matches in this one line, which is 2. So, the line really does not contain only match 193, but rather 192 and 193.
    
   
7. Where to save your report file.
   (ENTER key required!)

   Generally, you must designate the path (directory) incl. the name of the file, in DOS format. This requires all directory names and the filename to be no longer than 8 characters plus a dot plus a 3 chracters extension. Longer names (like under Windows) are not valid, here.

   TXTFNDR will not create any directories or paths, so the directories in the specified path must exist already. The filename may be new or old, but the old file will be overwritten (don't worry: TXTFNDR will ask you if he may do so).

   If the file is to be located in your current directory, only the filename is required (but remember you cannot save the report to a CD directory).

   If you specify an already existing file, TXTFNDR will ask if you want to overwrite it.

Translation software normally needs the input (= page texts) as ASCII text, without HTML tags/headings/trailings, and without the HTML special character notation.

I can offer you an existing, but undocumented and not officially supported 'as-is' function of TXTFNDR, without any warranty, that provides you with the pure German ASCII texts from the CD's HTML pages.
But you will have to contact me by e-mail (address at the bottom of each page) or by paper mail.