User:Laurenwake/SandboxPortGaz

A gazetteer is a dictionary of place names. Gazetteers describe towns, villages, churches and states, rivers and mountains, populations, and other geographical features. They usually include only the names of places that existed at the time the gazetteer was published and often their former names. The place names are generally listed in alphabetical order, similar to a dictionary.

Gazetteers may also provide additional information about a town, such as its:


 * Boundaries of civil jurisdiction.
 * Longitude and latitude.
 * Distances and direction from other from cities.
 * Schools, colleges, and universities.
 * Denominations and number of churches.
 * Major manufacturing works, canals, docks, and railroad stations.

You can use a gazetteer to locate the places where your family lived and to determine the civil jurisdictions over those places. For example, the town of XXXXX in the district of XXXX was created in XXXX. By searching a gazetteer one can learn that after XXXX this town was named XXXXa.

There may be many places in Portugal with the same or similar names. You will need to use a gazetteer to identify the specific town where your ancestor lived and the jurisdictions of the municipality, district, and state where records about him or her were kept.

Gazetteers at the Family History Library
Place names in the FamilySearch Catalog are listed under their modern names and current municipalities and states as they existed in 1993. To find the municipality that a town is filed under in the FamilySearch Catalog, you can do a "Subjects" search in the [https://www.familysearch.org/catalog/search FamilySearch Catalog for Portugal - Gazetteers.

DESCRIBE USEFUL GAZEETTERS - WHICH ONES USED IN CATALOGING - ASK THEN WRITE

Modern Place Names
For some research purposes such as correspondence, it is useful to learn modern jurisdictions for the area where your ancestor lived. This may also be helpful when finding the ancestral town on modern maps. The following modern gazetteers may be found at large libraries and archives and in the Family History Library:


 * Portugal and the Cape Verde Islands: official standard names approved by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Office of Geography, 1961. ; film item 3.


 * Divisão Territorial e Endereços de Portugal (Territorial Division and Addresses of Portugal). Lisboa, Portugal: STAPE, 2001.


 * Inventário colectivo dos registos paroquiais (Collective Inventory of Parish Registers). Lisboa, Portugal: Secretaria do Estado da Cultura, 1993-1994..