RootsChat.Com
General => The Common Room => The Lighter Side => Topic started by: Annie65115 on Friday 04 March 22 13:34 GMT (UK)
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OK, I know where Wales (the country) is! I grew up there!
But I have just seen on another thread a comment that if "Wales" was stated in a USA census record as the place of birth of an immigrant, it meant Wales, UK, not Wales, NSW.
I didn't know there was a Wales in NSW. BUt how many people know there is a Wales in South Yorkshire? Yep, it's in the metropolitan district of Rotherham; and just to up the ante, it's 7 miles as the crow flies from Rhodesia ::)
There must be lots of other duplicated placenames within the UK that potentially cause confusion. A friend of mine was convinced that her family were from the West Midlands for as far back as she could go, until I pointed out that the 1881 census actually gave the pob as Newcastle-o-T and not Newcastle under Lyme! And how many Newports are there? What others do people know?
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There is also a Wales in Maine. My ancestors lived just over the county line in neighboring Litchfield.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wales,_Maine
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And Egypt is in Yorkshire, as well - near Thornton :o
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Well I know there are a lot of villages called Whitchurch in England and a place called Gibraltar in Buckinghamshire.
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And Egypt is in Yorkshire, as well - near Thornton :o
and in the east end of Glasgow, Scotland.
Moscow in Ayrshire,California near Falkirk, Troon in Ayrshire and Cornwall.
All of which just emphasises the need to be accurate when recording place names.
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:D :D :D
The N.S.Wales Archives are located at Kingswood, a suburb of the City of Penrith NSW, Australia. Please never confuse that with Kingswood, a suburb of the City of Tamworth NSW, Australia.
Manilla is near Tamworth NSW
Texas is in Queensland
Newcastle is north of Swansea in NSW
Launceston is in Tasmania
1770 is a town in Queensland
Perth is in Western Australia
Auckland is in NSW
Wellington is in NSW
Londonderry is in NSW
Llandilo ... well of course, it is in NSW
;D
JM.
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As far back as 1732, there was confusion about the location of Wales. The grave stone of my 7X g-grandfather, Richard Tarr, in Rockport, Massachusetts says, "First settler of the town 1690, Born in Wales, England, Resided at Saco [Maine] in 1688, died 1732, Buried here in his own land, granted by him to the village for a burial ground."
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Wales has also picked up a Bethlehem in its travels. ;D
Mike
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America is in Wales too. In Flintshire near Moel Findeg.
Ray
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Bury in Lancashire has a district known as Jericho,there are even bricks made there that closely resemble the famous Accrington Engineering bricks.
Viktoria.
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And a Cyprus in London.
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London, UK.
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There is a London, Ontario, Canada. So anyone born there will be a Londoner. Canada style.
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Hull, East Yotkshire often filled in on Ancestry as being in Massachusetts. Very confusing when trees on Ancestry constantly list my Hull relies as born in Hull, Massachusetts ::)
Carol
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Blame those unimaginative 15th century English settlers who named everything after some place in England. It was only later that the colonists began to appreciate and use the beautiful names the Native Americans had given to the landscape. Right next door to Hull, MA is Cohasset and Scituate and Wompatuck.
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And there's a Scotland and an Ireland in Wiltshire.....
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My grandad was born in Quebec....but in county Durham, England - not Canada
Chris
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No wonder family historians have a permanently furrowed brow and prematurely grey hair ;D
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It has always been normal for emigrants to call their new places after their old ones. Often these are grouped together - Newcastle in New South Wales has a suburb called Wallsend, but little in the way of a Roman wall.
But it is not just emigrants who have done this! Off the top of my head:
George Marsh, later St. George the Martyr, lived at New York, a hamlet about a quarter of a mile from the parish church at Deane, south west of Bolton.
There's an area close to Edgbaston called California. I used to have my car serviced there.
Blackburn has an area known as Nova Scotia.
Chorley has an area known as Botany Bay, after the supposed ne'er-do-wells who frequented the area around the canal. To the south is an area formerly known as Abyssinia, because 150 years ago many of the people seen there were coal miners and so had black faces.
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I love the fact that America and Australia named their earliest British founded settlements after places in the UK. I think they felt homesick so decided to name them after places in the UK. Ignore the casual subtle racism from the people who say the English were unimaginative.
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"casual subtle racism"
rofl.
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Bury in Lancashire has a district known as Jericho,
The village of Edenfield is a few miles north. When I was a small child, I was convinced it was built on the site of the Garden of Eden.
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Near Boston in Massachusetts there is a Haverhill, Dedham, Newbury, Chelsmford, etc and many other places that were thankfully named after English settlements. So if I ever visited Boston I could feel at home.
There is a small parish called Dublin, Suffolk. So if anyone born there just put Dublin as their place of birth in the censuses and omitted the county, their descendants would think they had Irish blood.
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Unfortunately, Ancestry are to blame for a huge number of misplaced places.
Enter "Birmingham", for example, and they assume you mean the one in Alabama, rather than the British city which has 5 times the population.
Enter "Manchester", and you obviously meant the place in Jamaica, which does at least have a population larger than its New Hampshire namesake, but fails to have an international airport or a Premier League football club.
Lots of census entries have places of birth just like these, with no county named, because EVERYBODY knew just where they were. The transcriptions correctly reflect this, but Ancestry's algorithm assigns the record to Ancestry's "favourite" place without reference to the country where the record originates.
A typical Ancestry user doesn't check what their system has filled in. Only a small minority of us seem to correct things before moving on.
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I don't know about Ancestry, since I don't have a subscription, but FamilySearch favors Birmingham, West Midlands, England, United Kingdom over any other Birmingham when I do a general search for Smith in Birmingham. There are 245 pages of results; I looked at the first five pages and there was no mention of Birmingham, Alabama. Similarly, a search for Smith in Manchester places Manchester, Greater Manchester, England, United Kingdom first; no sign of Manchester, NH in the first five pages.
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Start typing in Somerset and the drop down menu may come up with Somalia for a split second when you have typed the "Som".
When I type in Sussex, I often get Sussex, Delaware, United States. Or Kent, Ohio as opposed to Kent, England.
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There's a Pennsylvania Castle in Dorset.
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Sadly, and I know it is painful, Somalia precedes Somerset, alphabetically speaking, so it comes up first when 'Som' is typed.
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And Denbigh has a place named
Copenhagen
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There is a London, Ontario, Canada. So anyone born there will be a Londoner. Canada style.
I spent years looking for the death of a g/uncle as I was told he'd died in 'London', except it was the one in Ontario ::)
There's a similar thread on same here...
https://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=715157.0
There's a Holland & Canada West in the Orkney Isles (Scotland)
Annie
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Blame those unimaginative 15th century English settlers who named everything after some place in England. It was only later that the colonists began to appreciate and use the beautiful names the Native Americans had given to the landscape. Right next door to Hull, MA is Cohasset and Scituate and Wompatuck.
To be precise, Hull's full title is Kingston-upon-Hull, as it is situated on the river Hull, an aptly named title at the time. It now has City status.
Carol
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No problem, there's a Kingston, Massachusetts, too. It's a pleasant little town just north of Plymouth. I used to go there occasionally with my mother when she lived in Duxbury just north of Kingston and south of Hull.
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There is a London, Ontario, Canada. So anyone born there will be a Londoner. Canada style.
I spent years looking for the death of a g/uncle as I was told he'd died in 'London', except it was the one in Ontario ::)
There's a similar thread on same here...
https://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=715157.0
There's a Holland & Canada West in the Orkney Isles (Scotland)
Annie
The same for 2 parishes in a county of the same name, which can lead to a lot of confusion. Also London, Canada has a Thames I think. One member of another forum was asking for info on a couple when wed in 1845 in Newcastle, Northumberland. I asked what were the names of the fathers of the couple, their occupations and witnesses. The user replied with "It is Newcastle, Northumberland, Australia". He said there are no father's names listed. Just names, dates, church, and ages.
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I used to go there occasionally with my mother when she lived in Duxbury just north of Kingston and south of Hull.
Duxbury is of course named after the one in Chorley. Myles Standish, of Mayflower fame, knew the original one well, as his cousins lived there.
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Yup, Myles Standish is buried there in "America's Oldest Maintained Cemetery."
https://newengland.com/today/travel/massachusetts/duxbury/
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There is a Southend in South London as well as the (just become a) city in Essex.
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There is also a Bethlehem in Wales, and I have rellies in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Carol
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And don't get me started on Uk multiple places
Norfolk has two Fritton's But one used to be in Suffolk until border reorg in 1972.
Two Yarmouth's one Great one not so much.
Hythe now there's a unique name, no it means Haven or small harbour. Hence there being three of them. Essex, Hampshire and Kent
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I was puzzled about a family who had children baptised at regular intervals over many years at a church in Lancashire (England) while their father's abode was a foreign, exotic place. Had he returned every couple of years, impregnated his wife and gone abroad again? Was the wife telling fibs about her husband being the father? What was more puzzling was parents and children were all buried in the local churchyard although their abode was still the foreign place. Investigating & poring over old maps, I found the exotic place - it was a farm on the moors above the village .
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"Hythe now there's a unique name, no it means Haven or small harbour. Hence there being three of them. Essex, Hampshire and Kent."
A good old Anglo-Saxon name then!
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There is a Thetford in Lincolnshire as well as Norfolk.
The confusion between Great Yarmouth, Norfolk (often known as Yarmouth) and Yarmouth IOW is quite astounding as well. An ancestor mentions a "cosen of Yarmouth" in his will, but Yarmouth Norfolk or IOW? I have tried to trace his time in either but to no avail yet.
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Jericho near Bury, Lancs.
Gibraltar, near Silverdale, north Lancs. and also Buckinghamshire
Bermuda, Warwickshire
Palestine, Hampshire
Egypt, Buckinghamshire
Philadelphia, Tyne & Wear
Florence, Staffordshire
Hollywood, near Birmingham
and many more in England alone.
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I can't at the moment think of any foreign placenames round here, though there may be some tucked away. I suspect many of those mentioned are 19th century urban developments?
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Liverpool has an Islington and a Kensington.
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There is a Nazareth in Flanders,near Gent,and a Bethlehem in Wales.
Viktoria.
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There are also place names which were intended to confuse for commercial purposes, such as Dresden, which is a part of Stoke-on-Trent.
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That could be handy,China stamped “Dresden “ might be mistaken for the genuine article !
Viktoria.
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Not too mention the number of Stratfords around the world!!! :o
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I was looking at a map of the England/Wales border tonight and spotted Botany Bay, with Barbadoes only a couple of miles away :)
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A 4 x grt uncle of mine (Thomas Burgess) named Bala, Muskokas, Ontario after Bala, Wales.
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There is a London, Ontario, Canada. So anyone born there will be a Londoner. Canada style.
I live in London, Ontario. Not born here though. The river running through it is the Thames, and our county is Middlesex. Parts of the city are called Westminster and Lambeth. The city of Windsor is west of us and Stratford is to the east.
The local hockey team is the Lunnonites…actually the London Knights, but that is the local pronunciation.
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Years ago, when OH and I were on a holiday trip, we stayed at Kingston in South Australia twice.
Once was in the Riverland district, not far from the Victorian border.
The other one was on the coast, south of Victor Harbor
The first one is correctly Kingston on Murray, and the second one is Kingston SE, or South East.
Very confusing when referring to them in the book or on photos :P ::)
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There are plenty of multiple occurrences of place names in the same area.
I live not far from Eccleston in Lancashire. The origin of the name is quite simple - a settlement with a church - so it is easy to see why Lancashire also has an Eccleston in Prescot, and a Great Eccleston and Little Eccleston in the Fylde.
Hale, Lancashire, Hale, Westmorland and Hale, Cheshire cause confusion in Ancestry's searches.
Close to Runcorn in Cheshire is the town of Halton. Across the Mersey, only a couple of miles away, part of Widnes is also called Halton. With reorganisations, both these places are now under the same local government. ;D
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There are quite a few places in Canada with the name Richmond (something to do with the Duke of Richmond in the early 1800’s): Richmond, Quebec; New Richmond, Quebec: Richmond, Ont., Richmond Hill, Ont., and Richmond, BC. There are probably more, those are the ones I can think of.
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There is also a New York in Lincolnshire.
Ella Fitzgerald would have to sing "We'll take Coningsby, Dogdyke and Gipsey Bridge too".
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Dublin is in the Flintshire village of Northop Hall which is called in Welsh, despite Wikipedia saying it is Neuadd Llaneurgain (literal translation), Pentre Moch. I leave you, dear reader, to translate.
:)
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:-X