Looking for places to search in your area? Here is some help.
- Bart
US Geographic Names Information System (GNIS)
(see link at bottom of page for Canada)
"The Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) is a data system developed by the U. S. Geological Survey (USGS) in cooperation with the U. S. Board on Geographic Names. The National Geographic Names Data Base is the largest of the GNIS databases, containing records on almost two million geographic feature names in the United States: from
populated places,
schools,
reservoirs, and
parks, to
streams,
valleys,
springs, and
ridges."
The Peabody version of the GNIS is an extract of the information present in the full GNIS database as distributed by the USGS (our extract represents "core data" that we have found most useful when trying to resolve USA locality issues with museum specimens, especially historical material). To obtain a current copy of the GNIS database on CD-ROM or other media, see the USGS GNIS website.
The records retrieved from the Peabody GNIS database service are all "one-liners" of information, containing the following fields: feature name, feature type, county, coordinates, mapname.
http://research.yale.edu/peabody/COLLECTIONS/gnis/
The following link is the Candian site for gnis;
http://geonames.nrcan.gc.ca/index_e.php
