-------- Original Message --------
Subject:        20th century and later descriptive gazetteers, mainly in the US
Date:   Wed, 15 Jan 2014 23:00:49 -0800
From:   Virginia R Hetrick PhD <[log in to unmask]>
To:     Maps, Air Photo, GIS Forum - Map Librarianship
<[log in to unmask]>



--
Hi, folks -

David's comments about descriptive gazetteers he was familiar with
stirred some memories of a couple of things I've been involved with.
It was customary, particularly toward the end of the 19th century and
the first several decades of the 20th century, for "newly settled"
areas in the Western US to develop gazetteers of their areas in which
they published the descriptive gazetteers that Humphrey describes in
his emails.

For example, Edmund Meany, a professor of botany and history at the
University of Washington and deeply interested in local
history/geography, died with his boots on in Denny Hall, shortly
before he was
  scheduled to deliver a lecture.  About 1908, he published Indian
Geographic Names of Washington which I'd characterize as a combination
of description, toponomy, and gazetteer.  It is in the Seattle Public
Library collection called Seattle Sawdust (as that's where the
original townsite was defined).  And, the whole collection is
available online at:

http://cdm15015.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/p15015coll6

Meany's book normally comes up as the 8th item in the list of items in
the collection.  You can use your browser's search function if you
prefer.

All of the materials in this collection were scanned in color at
600dpi.  Several geographers who received our advanced degrees from UW
have had a wonderful time reading through most of the documents in the
collection.  One entry from the book is in the next paragraph:

PALOUSE (accent on the second syllable, in which the diphthong has the
sount of "u" in "lute;" the first vowel is short and the final one is
ignored; the word is sometimes spelled Peloos in the journals of early
travelers, which gives a better idea of its pronunciation), name of a
river and a city in Whitman County.

I only remember this because I'm from the area and it struck me that
several of my graduate school colleagues would appreciate knowing
about it.  However, you may be interested in scouring the weekly
Internet Scout Report (http://scout.wisc.edu) which has been
publishing since the mid 1990s, approximately when the Internet was
becoming an serious online resource).

The archives are searchable, but the language is not usually the same
level of use as scholars of the various topics might generally write
or speak.  For example, my feeble brain remembered that Edmund Meany
wrote this and that the word "Gazetteer" was in the title - NOT in
either case.  So I ultimately set my email client to looking through
all the Scout Reports from 2013, which gave me a result in less than 2
minutes.  I describe this so that you will have an understanding that
searching for similar documents may be a non-trivial issue.

I hope this helps.  A description of how I learned to build gazetteer
entries when I worked in Pete Burrill's Office of Geography will
follow when it's not so late at night here in California.

Hope this helps.

virginia
------------------------------------------------
Virginia R. Hetrick, here in sunny California
Email:  [log in to unmask]
"There is always hope."
My fave:  http://www.washington.edu/cambots/camera1_l.jpg
There's no place like:  34N 8' 25.40", 117W 58' 5.36"
if you can't be at:  48N 7' 4.54" 122W 45' 50.95"
------------------------------------------------