Or you could try my "Vision of Britain" site. There are several ways to
use it, but one is to do a search of its "descriptive gazetteers" -- for
England, Bartholomew's Gazetteer of the British Isles (1887) and John
Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England & Wales (1872) -- from
here:
http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/descriptions
One option you can try is "search head words for sound-alikes", which
will then try to find names that sound like the name in the census
listing. For example, if you use this to search for "Findrington" and
specify the county as Cambridgeshire, it comes up with "Fen Drayton".
Another option is to search the full text of the gazetteer entries,
which will find names MENTIONED, rather than just those which are the
subjects of entries.
Two big caveats:
(1) The texts of the gazetteers was computerised using an optical
character recognition system. Although it has been read for errors
once, it would benefit from further proof reading.
(2) The sound-alike matching the system does uses the software built in
to the database as written by Oracle Corporation. For England the
biggest problem is that it comes back with some daft matches as well as
sensible ones, but for Wales it is pretty useless.
Best wishes,
Humphrey Southall
>>> "Postles, D.A." <[log in to unmask]> 04/05/08 8:45 PM >>>
You could try working through Lewis's Topographical Dictionary online
which is arranged alphabetically. Bovington is Bovingdon, for example.
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/source.aspx?pubid=445
Dave Postles
________________________________________
From: From: Local-History list [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf
Of John Chapman [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 04 May 2008 19:39
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [LOCAL-HISTORY] p[lace names from 1881 Census
I am trying to compile a list of men who were with the 66th Regiment
and
survived to take part in the 1881 Census. The enumerators seem to be
using
somewhat eccentric spellings and I am not sure they got the counties
right
either
The following have evaded me so far
BOGNOR Hants
BOVINGTON Herts
FINDRINGTON Cambs
FOWNER Bucks
KINGDON Berks [Kingston?]
NEWCASTLE Durham
NEWHAM Dorset
PEDLEY BRIDGE Yorks
SENDLY Durham
SOUTHERTON Berks
STEIPE Oxon
SUN BARTON Yorks
TYLEHURST Bucks
WESTHAM Essex
WEST OLVERTON Berks
WHITECHURCH Som [Whitchurch?]
WHITEFORD Warks
Any ideas would be welcomed
thanks
John Chapman
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