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This article first appeared in SIGGNL 5  (May/June 1994)

Counties and Parishes: or, Chapman goes West
based on material provided by Dennis West

A member of SIGG, Dennis West, has spent the greater part of a year in compiling a code list of locations in England, Scotland and Wales, as an extension of the Chapman codes already widely used for counties.  The West list has something like 29,000 entries, and a sample of part of the list for Worcestershire is shown on pages 9-11 of this Newsletter.  Although this is not essentially an indexing project, it seems to me that the code list could form an adjunct to the thesaurus of subject headings for indexes and abstracts in family history on which work has already started.

In addition to the list of parishes, Mr West has devised a further three-letter or number code for the identification of churches, chapels, etc, according to the dedication or denomination.  This has an advantage over other similar lists in that "Saint" has been omitted when determining the alphabetical order, so that names with variations can be individually identified.  Thus 25 names beginning "Mary" have been identified, and are coded separately.  He has named this list the "Dennis" optional third column, which I think needs an improved technical name, and using it one could identify a particular institution and its registers, etc, by a three-part coding, for example:

wor,DRO,120   Worcestershire, Droitwich, St Andrew

Dennis is anxious that his project should be reviewed by as many people as possible before it goes into print, and I have agreed to collect comments from members of SIGG for him.  I hope also help may be obtained from family history societies through the FFHS, so that the coding lists may be as useful as possible.  As a first step, if anyone would like to be involved in this project, would they please write to me or to Mr Dennis W. West, Ivy Mount, Welland Road, Hanley Swan, Worcester WR8 0DE for further details.

Click here for an example table of  Location Codes for County of Worcestershire

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