Tom Wetmore wrote: > To understand boundaries one must be an historian. If a genealogist truly wants to learn the nature > of all boundaries of all geo-political-eclesiastical entities that surrounded the areas where their > ancestors lived, either when their ancestors actually lived there, or as things are today, or both they > must invest in learning the necessary history. Isn't that simply the nature of the beast? It's fun to > bring up examples for the areas that we ourselves are experts, but it doesn't accomplish much in > the long run. > > Some genealogists care deeply about understanding places and recording the data by some system; > some don't. Some are happy just entering a name in field on a computer screen. Doesn't do them > any harm after all if things aren't correct. > > What would be very handy, and someday we will get there, is software that will take as input any > point on the globe (specified by either latitude and longitude, or just clicking on an adequately > scaled map), that then outputs the compete history of all the many overlapping, possibly conflicting, > multi-lingual, set of geopolitical entities that ever surrounded that point. Such gazetteers are > showing up with limited scopes (e.g., history of counties in the United States; history of the > changing boundaries and "provinces" making up Canada over its full history), so one can anticipate > the wonder we will feel when such an application appears. > > Other than that, it's just slog, slog, slog to learn the history that is needed. We all become experts > on small parts of the globe as we push back and find where our ancestors came from. I would not > have guessed that I would ever know a lot about Andreas Parish on the Isle of Man, or the towns in > Mongomeryshire, Wales, or the history of the fishing villages on Newfoundland, but when I found my > ancestors there is was simply the logical result of my research. I'm tempted to quote Mrs. Beeton and her recipe for jugged hare. When one is first looking into verifying data from a country not one's own, it is very helpful to know whether "Woodlands" is a house, a country, a church parish, or a county, or a local fish'n'chips joint. That discovery is aided by the inclusion of identifiers of the level of "house", "Parish", "county," "sanitary district", or even "Sagittarius Arm". Cheryl