At 17:18 21/02/2007, you wrote:
>Humphrey:
>
>In your reply below you write "what I am after, for now, is an authority
>list of (populated) places, not of place-names,
>and it will be tightly linked to our administrative units gazetteer". A
>variation of this request in your first plea for help I read carefully -
>and then dismissed. Now, however, I am bound to suggest "the number
>that I first thought of" [!] -
>
>Census 1951 : England and Wales : index of place names / General
>Register Office. - London : HMSO, 1955, reprinted 1956. - 2 vol.
>(iv,653p. ; [i],p.655-1377) ; 33 cm. - "2. The Index has been prepared
>from all sources open to the Census authorities, including the local
>registrars' detailed Census plans of their sub-districts, the Ordnance
>Survey maps, and the lists of [. . .] ecclesiastical parishes,
>parliamentary constitutencies [. . .] maintained at the Census Office to
>show the situation current at Census day." ('Introduction and notes' in
>vol. A - K, p.iii). - The data columns for each entry are headed: Name ;
>Description ; Administrative County in which situated ; Borough, Urban
>District or Rural District in which situated ; No. of Registration
>District in which situated ; Population 1951. - Contents: A - K ; L - Z
Yes, but what it lacks is grid references!
We have certainly looked at the census gazetteers, and NB for
Scotland the 1971 census gazetteer is the ultimate name authority
identified by the National Council on Archives in 1997. The NCA's
work was the basis for our existing work on constructing a name
authority for administrative units, and the archive sector's support
was the main reason we received lottery funding. In the end, we
covered Scotland by absorbing the SCAN gazetteer already constructed
by the Scottish National Archives, but in an ideal world we would
computerise the Scottish 1971 census gazetteer.
The Office of National Statistics gave us a copy in machine-readable
form of the 1981 census gazetteer for England and Wales. This does
include grid references, and my ONS contact claimed it was free of
Ordnance Survey copyright, but I am doubtful. We have not made more
use of this because quite a lot of the grid references are simply wrong.
At the moment, Chris's 1953 gazetteer looks to be the most recent OS
gazetteer to be free of copyright issues, and Chris and I have been
discussing off-list how to computerise it. Happy to consider
alternatives, but the census gazetteers look to either lack
coordinate data or be affected by OS copyright. The OS copyright
issue is crucial, because we want to use this as a framework for
much other information.
Humphrey
====================================
Humphrey Southall
Reader in Geography/Director,
Great Britain Historical GIS Project
Department of Geography, University of Portsmouth
Buckingham Building, Lion Terrace, Portsmouth PO1 3HE
GIS Project Office: (023) 9284 2500
Home office: (020) 8853 0396
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About Britain: http://www.VisionOfBritain.org.uk
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