The method
Checking a Name Yourself
This page exists so that nothing on this site has to be taken on trust. Four kinds of record settle almost every question about a place name, they are all public, and none of them costs anything.
Why this page and not a bibliography
Because a list of sources at the foot of an article tells a reader what was used and not how to use it. What is actually useful is knowing which of four records answers which kind of question, and this site has exactly four.
There are no outbound links anywhere on this publication. Each record below is described so that it can be found by name.
One: the federal names record
The United States maintains a national database of geographic names, run by the federal geological survey, which carries an official name for each feature along with variant names, the county, the coordinates, and the date the entry was decided. It is searchable free, by name and by state.
Use it for: whether a name is the official one, what the recorded variants are, and whether a local sign disagrees with the federal entry. Disagreements are common and are not errors, and the database usually shows both forms.
Do not use it for: why a name was chosen. It records names, not motives.
Two: National Register nominations
When a district or building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, somebody wrote a nomination to get it there, and those nominations are long, detailed, footnoted documents held by the national park service and available as scanned files by reference number.
They are the single most underused source on any American neighborhood. They contain dates of platting, names of architects and builders, materials, boundaries, and, quite often, corrections of local legend written by people who went through building records.
Use them for: who built what and when, and whether a widely repeated attribution survives contact with the records. The Riverside entry on this site rests entirely on one.
How to find one: search the National Register by district name and state to get the reference number, then request the text file for that number from the park service's gallery of nomination documents.
Three: plat books
A subdivision comes into existence when a plat is recorded with the county: a drawn map, a date, a name, and the person recording it. County records offices hold them, and many are now searchable online through the clerk of the circuit court for the county.
Use them for: the exact date a subdivision name was fixed, and by whom. This is the record that settles most plat-layer questions and the one that would close the Talleyrand gap if a reader found it.
Expect: older plats to be handwritten, indexed by book and page rather than by name, and occasionally to carry a name that never came into use.
Four: municipal annexation records
When a separate town is absorbed into a city, there is a record: an act, an ordinance, a vote. City clerks hold them, and larger cities publish historical indexes.
Use them for: how a small name came to cover a large area. That mechanism, not renaming, is what produced most of the district boundaries in this city, and it is the through line of San Marco, Murray Hill and four towns.
The four questions, matched to the four records
| The question | The record that answers it | What it will not tell you |
|---|---|---|
| Is this the official name | The federal names record | Why it was chosen |
| Who designed or built this | A National Register nomination | Anything outside the listed district |
| When was this subdivision name fixed | The county plat book | Whether anybody used the name |
| How did this name come to cover so much ground | Municipal annexation records | What the area was called before |
Two habits worth more than the records
Ask which document. When any source, this one included, states confidently that a person named a place in a particular year, the useful question is which document says so. If the answer is another article, the chain is not closed.
Expect no moment for a gradual change. Names that changed by erosion, like St. Nicholas, have no date because there was no act. A source that supplies one has invented it, usually by mistake, and knowing to expect the absence saves a great deal of searching.
If you find this site wrong
That is the outcome this page is designed to make possible. Corrections says what happens next: the record gets read again at the source, the page is fixed if it was wrong, and the fix is dated in public.