[Talk-us-massachusetts] Talk-us-massachusetts Digest, Vol 41, Issue 5

[Andy Anderson]

Town names are definitely unique in Massachusetts, I’ve looked through the entire list :-). I believe even the cities, which have the ability to grow in size, are all within one county. For example Boston in Suffolk County annexed Charlestown on the other side of the river, and it’s not part of Middlesex County like one might think by looking at it. That’s probably also why Brookline in Norfolk County is disconnected from the rest of the county, as Boston annexed that area and also brought it into Suffolk.

Anyway, I think it’s a good idea to have county somewhere in a city/town’s metadata, along with state.

I’m not certain this one-county principle is generally true. But I have read that the uniqueness of town names within states is standard, due to the US Post Office in the 19th century requiring unique post office names. Many towns thereupon changed their names, e.g. the popularly named Washington, Ohio in the eastern part of the state changed its name to Old Washington to establish its primacy :-).

— Andy

> On Feb 24, 2020, at 10:22 AM, Greg Troxel <gdt at lexort.com> wrote:
> 
> Yury Yatsynovich <yury.yatsynovich at gmail.com> writes:
> 
>> I was adding addr:county tags to help me process towns when importing
>> addresses from MassGIS: I thought that there might be towns with same names
>> in different counties, so to avoid errors I was using County&Town
>> identifier. If there are any other ways to uniquely identify towns in MA,
>> I'm OK about deleting addr:county.
> 
> As I understand it, actual town names are unique.  Even pseudotowns like
> hyannis I believe are also unique.   place names that are not towns,
> maybe not so much.
> 
> 
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