> From: Tim Treeby > Sent: 11 March 2017 17:55 > > Was trying to keep it as simple as possible without adding the confusion > of a Third type of "County". > Which is why I recommend that everyone looks at > http://www.gazetteer.org.uk/index.php (When dealing with UK place names) > and reads the section labelled Notes for Historians, which explains it > all a lot better then I can. What this page does for me is convince me even more than I thought it before, that the idea of fixed 'historic' counties is useless. The Welsh 'historic' counties are said to be as defined in 1539 (so what does one record for history before that?). The database returns *two* counties for detached parts of counties that were tidied up in 1844 and transferred to a contiguous county. The description has no recognition of the concept of a county corporate (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/County_corporate) although these were administrative units created between the 12th and 19th centuries - some of them are older than the 'historic' Welsh counties. According to their database, Berwick-on-Tweed was historically only in the County of Northumberland and in England, despite changing countries between England and Scotland 12 times between 1100 and 1482, being a county corporate since 1551, and requiring a special section in a 1746 Act of Parliament to make it explicit that it was part of England. In my database I try to record the places as given in the historic records, adding the historic administrative units contemporary with the record if necessary. The past was not static or uniform; I see no reason to distort history by pretending that it was. Best wishes Andrew -- Andrew Millard - A.R.Millard@durham.ac.uk Chair, Trustees of Genuki: www.genuki.org.uk Maintainer, Genuki Middx + London: www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/MDX/ + ../LND/ Academic Co-ordinator, Guild of One-Name Studies: www.one-name.org Bodimeade one-name study: community.dur.ac.uk/a.r.millard/genealogy/Bodimeade/ My genealogy: community.dur.ac.uk/a.r.millard/genealogy/