The following was accidentally posted to an earlier date. It’s reposted here in case you missed it.
Do you have problems locating and understanding historical place names in Scotland? Pre-19th-century spellings were unstandardized, requiring flexible search strategies.
In June, the National Library of Scotland released a comprehensive placenames research guide that consolidates ten searchable placename databases covering 400 years of Scottish cartographic history.
The guide organizes gazetteers chronologically, from Timothy Pont’s pioneering surveys (1583-1600) through contemporary OpenStreetMap data. Notable collections include the Roy Military Survey (1747-1755) with 33,523 names, Joan Blaeu’s complete atlas of Scotland (1654) containing 28,394 entries, and the massive Ordnance Survey database (1888-1913) with 2.5 million transcriptions.
