Poland Maps

[Llanque Mazurek]

ThoughPoles first emigrated to what is now the United States in 1608, most arrived in the largest wave between 1870 and 1914. Polish Americans have always constituted the majority of immigrants of Slavic origin in the United States. Finding the birthplace of a Polish ancestor can be troublesome, however, given that no sovereign Polish state existed from the partitions of the late eighteenth century until the end of the Great War. As a result, most Poles who emigrated to the United States around the turn of the century were identified as being from either Prussia, Russia, or Galicia (Austria).

To find communities in Poland prior to the Second World War, reference staff have often relied on a set of topographic maps prepared by Poland's Wojskowy Insytut Geograficzny at 1:100,000 scale in the 1920s-30s. The set consists of approximately 480 sheets, often published in up to four editions per sheet. The set also includes coverage of parts of the neighboring states of Lithuania, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Nazi Germany, including East Prussia. Place names in this series usually appear by their Polish spellings. The set is filed in the Geography and Map Division under LC call number G6520 s100 .P6.

There are numerous gazetteers to search for place names in Poland, and several are listed in the Eastern European box on the Gazetteers page under Reference Resources within this research guide. Possibly the most comprehensive is the fifteen volume Słownik geograficzny Królestwa Polskiego first issued in the 1880s and reprinted in the 1970s. While exceptionally informative in geographical and historical information on Polish communities, it does not identify a location's latitude or longitude. Furthermore, all entries are in Polish, a deterrent to non-Polish speakers but an inspiration to those who wish to fully engage with their Polish roots. Nevertheless, we possess a good source for geographic coordinates, that being the JewishGen Gazetteer External, which covers modern Poland and parts of lands once ruled by Poland, i.e., Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. When uncertain of the current location of a Polish community, researchers may find it helpful to search for place names under all of Eastern Europe, and then select the entry under Poland nearest to the likely coordinates.

Almost as convenient to use is the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's GEOnet Names Server External, which is the official repository of standard spellings of all foreign geographic names. Researchers should keep in mind that searches in GEOnet Names Server for place names in Poland must be limited to those communities currently within the modern Republic of Poland. On the other hand, searches for towns and villages once part of Poland but now in Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine must be limited by their respective countries, owing to the changes of borders in the twentieth century.

As our search example, let us use the famous historical city of Toruń, situated on the right bank of Poland's most important river, the Vistula. First settled in the eighth century, it was enlarged by the German Order of Knights in the 13th century. Toruń (then known as Thorn) became an important commercial center, and over the centuries was fought over and ruled by Knights, Poles, Prussians, and Germans. Though of modest size today, the city retains a beautifully preserved medieval center. Over the centuries Toruń has achieved a sort of cosmological status, for it is the birthplace of astronomer and mathematician, Nicolaus Copernicus, whose revolutionary model of the universe displaced the earth from its center and vicariously launched Toruń into renown. For no other reason, Toruń is worth exploring.

In the enlargement below we notice a bit more of Toruń's immediate features. Among them are the river, the outlines of the medieval city with its numerous churches, adjacent towns and villages, houses, forests and cultivated fields, railroads, roads, submerged lands, and relief.

Gratefully, Allied and German bombing overlooked Toruń during the Second World War, thereby sparing its heritage, which dates back to the 8th century, and reaffirming its former prominence in the Hanseatic League. Both are exhibited in its variety of architectural styles, exemplified by its cathedral and churches, defensive walls, leaning tower, and gothic houses.

Advancements in next-generation sequencing technology have enabled whole genome re-sequencing in many species providing unprecedented discovery and characterization of molecular polymorphisms. There are limitations, however, to next-generation sequencing approaches for species with large complex genomes such as barley and wheat. Genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS) has been developed as a tool for association studies and genomics-assisted breeding in a range of species including those with complex genomes. GBS uses restriction enzymes for targeted complexity reduction followed by multiplex sequencing to produce high-quality polymorphism data at a relatively low per sample cost. Here we present a GBS approach for species that currently lack a reference genome sequence. We developed a novel two-enzyme GBS protocol and genotyped bi-parental barley and wheat populations to develop a genetically anchored reference map of identified SNPs and tags. We were able to map over 34,000 SNPs and 240,000 tags onto the Oregon Wolfe Barley reference map, and 20,000 SNPs and 367,000 tags on the Synthetic W9784Opata85 (SynOpDH) wheat reference map. To further evaluate GBS in wheat, we also constructed a de novo genetic map using only SNP markers from the GBS data. The GBS approach presented here provides a powerful method of developing high-density markers in species without a sequenced genome while providing valuable tools for anchoring and ordering physical maps and whole-genome shotgun sequence. Development of the sequenced reference genome(s) will in turn increase the utility of GBS data enabling physical mapping of genes and haplotype imputation of missing data. Finally, as a result of low per-sample costs, GBS will have broad application in genomics-assisted plant breeding programs.

This is an open-access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication.

The development of molecular markers and genomic resources in barley and wheat has always been a formidable task due the massive, complex, and, in the case of wheat, polyploid genomes [1], [2], [3]. The diploid barley genome is over 5.5 GB and the hexaploid wheat genome is roughly three times larger at 16 GB [4]. The development of new sequencing technologies has greatly increased the discovery of SNPs in many species [5], including important model and non-model crop plants such as rice [6] maize [7], soybean [8], common bean [9], and sorghum [10]. SNP discovery in the wheat D-genome predecessor, Aegilops tauschii, was recently completed using next-generation sequencing (NGS), marking a step forward for SNP markers in large and complex genomes [11]. The discovery of high-density molecular markers in crop species will lead to a better understanding of the genetic architecture of complex traits and its application in breeding programs for crop improvement through whole genome association studies [12], [13] and genomic selection [14], [15].

RAD genotyping was recently applied in barley to identify 530 SNP markers, construct a genetic linkage map and map quantitative trait loci [21]. The original GBS approach was also applied in barley to effectively map sequence tags as dominant markers on a reference map [19]. Here we apply a two-enzyme GBS approach to barley and wheat and demonstrate the robustness of GBS for genotyping in species with large, complex, and even polyploid genomes. The development of high-density (10,000 to 100,000+ markers) in species that are lacking a reference genome will facilitate the development (anchoring and ordering) of the reference genome sequence while providing tools for genomics-assisted breeding.

To enable multiplex sequencing of the PstI GBS libraries, we designed a set of DNA barcodes ranging in length from 4 bp to 9 bp that balanced the base composition of the GBS library with the overhang generated by PstI restriction digest (Table S1). Modulation of the length of GBS barcodes while selecting barcodes with balanced sets of nucleotides at each position reduces phasing errors in the Illumina sequencing run [19]. A barcode design algorithm was written in Java to select a set of suitable barcodes for PstI (see Materials and Methods, Tables S1 and S2).

We constructed two 48-plex libraries from the OWB population and four 48-plex libraries from the SynOpDH population consisting of a single sample of each DH line and replicated samples of each parent. The libraries were sequenced on Illumina GAII or Illumina HiSeq2000. From the (unfiltered qseq) Illumina data, sequences were assigned to individual samples using the barcode sequence and trimmed to 64 bp for faster processing. Only sequences that had an exact match to a barcode followed by the expected sequence of 5 nucleotides remaining from a PstI cut-site were kept. Tags were defined as unique sequences within the data set and collapsed by lines.

To identify SNPs in the populations, all pairs of tags were evaluated for a one or two base-pair difference. Bi-allelic SNPs were identified by querying the filtered tags for pairs of sequences which were 1) identical except for one or two nucleotide(s), 2) present in >20% of the individuals and 3) passed a Fisher Exact test for independence. We examined independence at each possible pair to avoid paralogous SNPs which would presumably segregate independently. In contrast, allelic SNPs should be mutually exclusive in inbred lines. These tags were then designated bi-allelic SNPs with two alleles and missing data. If a SNP call was heterozygous, presumably due to sequencing errors, this call was set to missing data.

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