Hi all,
The following was taken from Dick Eastman's most recent newsletter.
- Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names
Two weeks ago I wrote about the geographic name server at MIT. This
is an excellent database of geographic names from around the U.S.
and can be valuable to genealogists trying to find a small town
mentioned in old records. Several people wrote to me after I
published that article to tell me of still other online name
servers. I have looked at several but the one that really impressed
me is the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names produced by the Getty
Information Institute.
This online geographic name server is much like the one I mentioned
earlier. However, it contains nearly 1 million place names
representing approximately 900,000 places around the world. For
instance, anyone looking for a town called Billericay can quickly
find that it is in Essex, England at 51 degrees 38 minutes North, 00
degrees 25 minutes East. A good map of England can then be used to
quickly locate these geographic coordinates.
I tried a harder search: I entered "Wassookeag" and quickly found
the listing for the lake where I spent boyhood summers. It is at
Lat: 45 01 N Long: 069 18 W. Every name I could think of was in the
name server. It even has multiple variations of each location.
Beijing, Peking, Pei-Ching and Pekin all point to China's capital.
Some of the locations have brief descriptions, such as this one for
a remote city where I once spent two weeks of my life:
Changchun (inhabited place)
Lat: 43 50 N Long: 125 20 E
Note - Formerly a small village until end of 18th cen. when
farmers were brought in from Shandong province; thrived after
1900; captured by Russian paratroopers during World War II in
1945; was scene of conflicts in Chinese civil war 1946-1947.
If you are looking for that small place where your ancestors lived,
check out the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names at:
http://www.gii.getty.edu/tgn_browser
My thanks to Dave Rencher for letting me know about this one.
If you want to see the current issue as well as back issues of the
newsletter, look on the World Wide Web at:
http://www.ancestry.com/columns/eastman/index.htm
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------------------------
Judy Kelble
http://www.rootsweb.com/~ohgenweb (OHGenWeb)
http://www.accnorwalk.com/~jkelble (Huron County, OH genealogy)
State Coordinator for OHGenWeb
County Coordinator for Huron County, OH
Listowner for Huron County, OH discussion group
Listowner for Lorain County, OH discussion group
E-mail: jkelble(a)accnorwalk.com