Family Historian User Group

Here's an interesting problem I haven't run into before now.

I always try to use a place's correct historical name for past events while recording its current name as the standardised placename. However, some of my wife's ancestors are from colonial New York and were the first (European) settlers in places that were not organised and named until later times. How best to record the name of a place that didn't yet have a name without being anachronous and without making it look like I just haven't been able to determine the specific location?

For example, I have an ancestor of my wife living in a place that is today known as Colchester, Delaware County, New York, USA. Although it has been part of various different counties over time, for as long as that place has had a name, it has been called Colchester. However, at the time he was living there, it was just an unorganised part of Albany County in the Province of New York. I don't want to record the name as "Colchester, Albany County, , New York", since Colchester was not founded for another 20+ years. But to record it as " , Albany County, , New York" makes it look like the specific place is unknown, which is not the case.

How might you record such a place? I'm leaning towards "[Colchester], Albany County, , New York", but perhaps you have a better idea about how to handle such cases?

Peter,
As long as you use ‘Colchester…’ as the localised name so that it geocodes correctly, it really doesn’t matter what you call it, so may I suggest that a simple ‘Township…’ or ’ ‘Settlement…’ would suffice

It would need to be suitably qualified to be unique, so Settlement, Albany County, etc, wouldn't work if there was likely to be more than one. You should probably adopt a system that allows for that in the future even if not needed now, so something like Settlement [Colchester], Albany County... would work.