Author Topic: Downloadable list of parish/hamlet/village/place names for searching?  (Read 401 times)

Offline bugbear

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Downloadable list of parish/hamlet/village/place names for searching?
« on: Sunday 13 April 25 09:52 BST (UK) »
When decoding dubiously written (and spelt) place names from old documents, I would very much like to use wildcards, regexes and "sounds like" (SONDEX and others) on a list of known places.

Does anyone know of a large list of UK place names, ideally with as many old variants as possible, that I could download?

I have a collated list from the Facebook group "Place Names of England" which has around 30,000 names, that the best I've found so far.
BICE Middlesex
WOMACK Norfolk/Suffolk

Offline PrawnCocktail

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Re: Downloadable list of parish/hamlet/village/place names for searching?
« Reply #1 on: Sunday 13 April 25 10:17 BST (UK) »
I don't think there is any one list.

I find the Towns and Parishes pages on Genuki useful, here is Northamptonshire's
https://www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/NTH/parishes. I chose a part of the name that isn't so corruptible, and search the page for that.

For finding Civil Registration districts, there is https://www.ukbmd.org.uk/reg/places/regindex3.pdf

And for getting down to hamlet or farm level, I've yet to beat the maps at the National Library of Scotland, the 1880's 25 inch maps can be layered with satelite images to tell you precisely where you are:

https://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/#zoom=16.0&lat=52.13255&lon=-0.99086&layers=168&b=ESRIWorld&o=58
Website: http://freepages.rootsweb.com/~towcesterfamilies/genealogy/
Towcester - anything, any time
Cheshire - Lambert, Houghland, Birtwisle
Liverpool - Platt, Cunningham, Ditton
London - Notley, Elsom, Billett
Oxfordshire - Hitchcock, Smith, Leonard, Taunt
Durham - Hepburn, Eltringham
Berwickshire - Guthrie, Crawford
Somerset - Taylor (Bath)
Gloucestershire - Verrinder, Colborn
Dorset - Westlake

Offline maddys52

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Re: Downloadable list of parish/hamlet/village/place names for searching?
« Reply #2 on: Sunday 13 April 25 10:54 BST (UK) »
And wikipedia has list of places (towns, villages, cities) in different Counties, eg this one for Gloucestershire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_places_in_Gloucestershire

Offline bugbear

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Re: Downloadable list of parish/hamlet/village/place names for searching?
« Reply #3 on: Sunday 13 April 25 12:07 BST (UK) »
Following up on PrawnCocktail's GenUKI link led in turn their source, which was this;

https://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/data/#tabgb1900

That'll do pig, that'll do.
BICE Middlesex
WOMACK Norfolk/Suffolk