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Sunday, May 25, 2008

WHILE YOU'RE IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD

When I got the idea to do a series of posts about
some of the place names of New England and
another series on pronunciations, I found two very
useful sites on Google.


One is a list of "Archaic Community, District,
Neighborhood, Section and Village, Names in
Massachusetts" on the Citizens Information
Services website run by the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts. It gives an alphabetical list of old
place names organized in the following fashion:

"place name/located in/County of/a.k.a."

So Assinippi is listed this way:

"Assinippi / part of Hanover & Norwell / Plymouth
/ Post Office in Hanover, a.k.a. Snappy".

A second site is a 1890 Gazetteer of Massachusetts
by the Rev. Elias Nason.
It has a list of towns and
villages from Abbott Village in Andover to Zylonite
in Adams with other fascinating names like
Donkeyville, Dragon's Corner, Egypt, and Wyoming
along the way.

It's fascinating to see these old place names and it
made me wonder if some of my Abbott ancestors
from Andover lived in Abbott Village for example.

How about you? You may know the name of the
town or city one of your ancestors lived in, but do
you know if they lived in a specific village or district
of that town that you don't know about?

Maybe a search in a gazetteer will help!

1 comment:

GreenmanTim said...

Mine certainly did and I think yours as well. Abbott Village was on the Shawsheen where the old mills are now, mostly on the west side.