When travelling in foreign parts, I find it a little jarring to see places with the same names as places back home with which I'm familiar, especially when the foreign place has no other obvious connection with its namesake.
Newcastle in New South Wales is at least a port, and actually exports coal, like the -on-Tyne version did. However it has a suburb called Wallsend, which has nothing to do with the emperor Hadrian.
A huge number of places are named after people in authority. Australia is full of places named after Governor Macquarie, which must lead to many Australians experiencing jarring as they pass a Lake Macquarie which doesn't look like the one of their youth.
But there are a load of places documented as being named after the homes of immigrants. A convict in my one-name-study named his new home in Van Diemen's Land "Marchweil", after his birth place near Wrexham. Myles Standish, the military man on the Mayflower, named his new estate "Duxbury", after his family's estate in Lancashire.
However, with forced migration, those around you were less likely to come from the same part of the world. New England, Canada and New Zealand, settled by people who had, for the most part, made a decision to go, might well head off to place names with which they were familiar. One of my Dunbabins from Cheshire headed to Pennsylvania, and his will showed that he died in Aston, Chester County, which I initially confused with Aston, County Chester. Earlier Quakers from his area had named the area in New England. Records show that he had a letter of introduction when he arrived in 1714.
