Köllner Estate and Enhancements to the Family Explorer

Enhancements to the Family Explorer

The Family Explorer, introduced in January, has been supplemented with several new functions. Different spellings of a family name are now automatically merged – an adaptation that accommodates the historical transmission situation: parish registers regularly contain divergent spellings for the same family, such as "Seidl", "Seidel" or "Seydl". Furthermore, the Explorer can now be accessed directly via URL parameters (e.g. ?family=seidl), enabling linking from external sources as well as from the individual person entries of each glassworks.

Integration of the Köllner Estate

A substantial expansion of the data holdings was achieved through the systematic processing of the research estate of Volkmar Johannes Adalbert Köllner (1912–1991). Köllner, himself a descendant of a glassmaking family from the Waldviertel, conducted extensive research on glassmakers during the 1980s, intensively studying parish registers and manorial records. His estate, comprising more than 2,000 typewritten pages and containing data on approximately 55 glassmaking families, was preserved in the Gmünd archive following his death.

Approximately 80 percent of the persons documented in this estate could be assigned to specific glassworks and entered into the Glashytt database. Köllner's references to manorial records prove particularly valuable, as these frequently date back to before 1700 and contain early mentions of glassmakers that had not previously been recorded in the existing literature.

For methodological context, it should be noted that Köllner's work was subject to certain limitations: the parish registers had to be excerpted on-site under considerable time pressure, which occasionally led to reading and transcription errors. Additionally, there was no access to the parish registers in neighbouring Southern Bohemia, to which glassmakers regularly and often at short notice relocated. The integration of his estate into Glashytt makes it possible to gradually close these gaps through comparison with the Bohemian sources now digitised on Matricula.

The complete estate is available online via the Familia Austria finding aid: www.familia-austria.findbuch.net. Gratitude is here expressed to Volkmar Köllner for his meticulous research work, which remains an indispensable starting point for the study of Waldviertel glassmaking families even decades after his death. Equal thanks are due to Familia Austria for the digitisation and provision of this valuable collection.

User Interface Improvements

Additionally, optimisations were made to the user interface: a redesigned menu with improved mobile navigation, a new blog layout, and optimised marker display and improved clustering behaviour on the map.