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| No: 133 |
March 2017
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News March Seminars & Heritage Walks 8: How to be a successful family historian (3rd of 7 weekly sessions) 8:00pm WEA Centre, Adelaide April Seminars & Heritage Walks 2: SE cnr Adelaide heritage walk 2:00pm WEA Centre, Adelaide 9: SW cnr Adelaide heritage walk 2:00pm WEA Centre, bookings 12: English research 6:30pm WEA Centre, Adelaide 23: Nth Adelaide walk heritage walk 2:00pm WEA Centre, bookings 30: E of Victoria Square heritage walk 2:00pm WEA Centre, bookings See the seminar program for more details and bookings for 2017. Using place codes Using place codes to identify locations can be an important aid in family history for a number of reasons including:
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In
this issue: |
Graham Jaunay |
| This concept was pioneered by a series of abbreviations developed in the 1920s by the English Place Name Society. The scheme was developed and promoted by genealogist Colin Chapman, in the late 1970s to address the particular points raised above. His work was restricted to the United Kingdom and the counties existing in the 19th and 20th centuries. His system involved two levels—country and county codes using three letters which were intuitive meaning that even if you did not know the system it was still likely you could recognise the place. These codes proved popular with genealogists and in some case people like myself started to extend the concept beyond the United Kingdom in the 1980s using postal letter codes in upper case as had been the Chapman practice. In the 1980s most family history reporting was done on paper and preprinted pedigree charts and the like did not welcome lengthy addresses.
The Chapman County Coding was used in 1987 by the British Standards Institution as the basis for the preparation of British Standard 6879 and by the International Standards Organisation in Geneva when publishing ISO 3166-1. The creation of International Standard codes for locations has enabled accurate but short addresses for the whole globe although the very large number of place codes has sometimes meant a loss of ready recognition! DZA is not obviously Algeria! We can also have some confusion even when using correct codes. Televised cricket uses SA for South Africa which is the standard code for South Australia. South Africa is ZA. Regardless we look forward to the day when all family historians adopt the standard codes instead of using a multitude of made-up material that may confuse!  ISO 3166-1 is the standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and defines codes for the names of countries, dependent territories, and special areas of geographical interest. It is further subdivided into three sections:
For less obvious regions I recommend using the regional two-letter code in conjunction with the country three-letter code. Thus rather than using just AN for the Spanish region of Andalusia I would use the country code as a prefix, thus ESP-AN. All doubts are removed and there is no chance of duplication or confusion between SA and ZA as outlined above! Probably the best site to locate codes at this time is Wikipedia: ISO 3166-1. About a third down the page you will find a list of all countries with their two-letter, three-letter and numeric codes and a link to their regions. If you are working in reverse and come across an unfamiliar code just Google ISO and the unknown code as ISO ESP-AN. One final point. It is important to always cite the address as it was at the time. Thus in the case of Middlesex that was gradually swallowed by London we would expect to see the code used as MDX until the particular address was absorbed by London when the code LND would be used. Now this matter does create a few problems and the most significant relates to those counties with name changes. For example the Scottish county of Forfarshire became Angus in 1928 and so technically the records predating this belong to Forfarshire and there is no code for extinct counties. |
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