Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
archives because they are willing to pay significant sums for facsimiles of
archival documents concerning their families, such as birth certificates
and wills. These documents were generally created by historical admin-
istrative units such as parishes and registration districts, and amateur
researchers may have large problems identifying which administrative
area contained their ancestor's place of residence; in other words, they
need to identify the polygon containing a known point. One key recent
development is that an increasing proportion of archival documents,
especially those of interest to family historians, have been digitized and
are available for purchase online, so researchers do not need to visit the
places their ancestors lived in, but they still need to find documents
organized geographically.
Traditional archive catalogs, like traditional library catalogs, are
held on filing cards arranged alphabetically. Computerizing these cata-
logs has usually meant transferring the text from each card to a database
record. In this context, creating a “geographical catalog” means associat-
ing one geographical name with each record. One problem is deciding
which name to use, for example, the name of a house, the name of the
street it was in, or the name of the setlement. English local record oices
have tried to standardize these records by using the name of the parish.
The second problem is deciding the exact form of the name, which may
have large consequences for arranging the cards in alphabetical order,
for example, “Great Barford,” “Barford, Great,” or “Barford Magna”?
Should the saint's dedication of the parish be included and, if so, where:
“Barford St. Margaret” or “St. Margaret Barford”? “Great Barford” is
fairly clearly a diferent parish from “Litle Barford,” but is it the same
as “Barford St. Margaret”?
“Name authorities” are lists that define which form of a name should
appear in a catalog. W here the catalog is computerized, name authorities
define a “controlled vocabulary,” meaning the set of character strings
that can appear in a given database column. Although a name author-
ity can be a simple list, a beter name authority will include “alternate
names” and identify for each which “preferred name” should be used
instead. In Wales or Estonia we also need to identify the languages
names are in. A name authority of the parishes of England will also
need to deal with the many parish names that correctly refer to more
