By James M. Beidler
Tips for searching Ancestry.com's version of the classic resource for locating German villages.
The seminal handbook for tracking down German villages goes by the
title
Meyers Orts- und Verkehrs-Lexikon des Deutschen Reiches. (Is it
any wonder genealogists call it
Meyers Orts- for short?) You’ll find
this resource on the subscription website
Ancestry.com, but it takes a
little help to use effectively. Here’s a 1-2-3 from the folks at the
Mid-Atlantic Germanic Society:
1. On the
Ancestry.com 
home page, go to the link for Card Catalog.
2. Enter the word Meyers under Database Title and click Search.
3. Click on the search result Meyers Gazetteer of the German Empire.
4. In the Location search box, enter the name of the town. Don’t check the “exact matches only” box.
5. If you don’t get any hits or wind up on the wrong page, go back to
the Location search box and enter at least the first three letters of
the town name followed by an asterisk (*).
6. Search the results for the town or one that sounds similar to the
spelling you have, and call up the page from Meyers Orts- by clicking
View Record, then View Original Image.
7. If you discover several towns with the same name, look for the one or two that are in the correct German state.
8. See Wendy K. Uncapher’s How to Read and Understand Meyers Orts- (Origins) to interpret what you find.
From the December 2006 Family Tree Magazine.