Are (near)duplicate names for different English counties a risk?
The county of "Hampshire, England" (Place Id 10604925) has a string of names, some of which I've never seen but never mind. One that concerns me is the first name:
Hāmtūnscīr, ang, Full Name
There's also:
Hamtunscīr, Latin (la), Full Name
The county of "Northamptonshire, England" (Place Id 10600728) has a string of names, the first one of which is:
Hāmtūnescīr, ang, Full Name
There's also:
Hamtunscire, xno, Variant Name
The 4 names are different - there's an extra "e" in the middle of the 3rd name, and similarly at the end of the 4th name. Also, the various accents (diacritics?) tend to be different.
Given that there has to be a degree of flexibility in the matching algorithms for placenames (otherwise "York" would never match "york", for instance), does the closeness of these names for Hampshire and Northamptonshire pose a risk to matching in FS place-matching algorithms?
Note that the (near) duplication of the names does have an origin in fact - according to the Wikipedia entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northamptonshire that county was first recorded as "Hamtunscire" and the "North" was sensibly added later to distinguish it from the similar name for what became Hampshire.
If the near identity of the 2 names for different counties does pose a problem, I would advocate removing the names "Hāmtūnescīr" and "Hamtunscire" from the record for Northamptonshire. Yes, they are strictly correct but I would suggest that they are genealogically irrelevant - they are Anglo-Saxon in origin (that's what the "scir" bit is - it's now "shire" in English) and they will be seen, I believe, in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Domesday Book, early medieval charters, etc. Not likely to be found in FamilySearch - certainly not in the original Anglo-Saxon…
Kommentare
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When I just tested entering "Hāmtūnscīr" as a placename, I got offered "Hampshire, England, United Kingdom" as first in the list and "Northamptonshire, England, United Kingdom" as 3rd in the list.
Given that I've never been able to convince myself that the placename auto-standardisation 'bot always takes the first in the list, this does suggest a risk to me.
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