Where is Wales?

[andrewalston]

It has always been normal for emigrants to call their new places after their old ones. Often these are grouped together - Newcastle in New South Wales has a suburb called Wallsend, but little in the way of a Roman wall.

But it is not just emigrants who have done this! Off the top of my head:

George Marsh, later St. George the Martyr, lived at New York, a hamlet about a quarter of a mile from the parish church at Deane, south west of Bolton.

There's an area close to Edgbaston called California. I used to have my car serviced there.

Blackburn has an area known as Nova Scotia.

Chorley has an area known as Botany Bay, after the supposed ne'er-do-wells who frequented the area around the canal. To the south is an area formerly known as Abyssinia, because 150 years ago many of the people seen there were coal miners and so had black faces.

[coombs]

I love the fact that America and Australia named their earliest British founded settlements after places in the UK. I think they felt homesick so decided to name them after places in the UK. Ignore the casual subtle racism from the people who say the English were unimaginative.

[Erato]

"casual subtle racism"

rofl.

[Maiden Stone]

Bury in Lancashire has a district known as Jericho,

The village of Edenfield is a few miles north. When I was a small child, I was convinced it was built on the site of the Garden of Eden.

[coombs]

Near Boston in Massachusetts there is a Haverhill, Dedham, Newbury, Chelsmford, etc and many other places that were thankfully named after English settlements. So if I ever visited Boston I could feel at home.

There is a small parish called Dublin, Suffolk. So if anyone born there just put Dublin as their place of birth in the censuses and omitted the county, their descendants would think they had Irish blood.

[andrewalston]

Unfortunately, Ancestry are to blame for a huge number of misplaced places.

Enter "Birmingham", for example, and they assume you mean the one in Alabama, rather than the British city which has 5 times the population.

Enter "Manchester", and you obviously meant the place in Jamaica, which does at least have a population larger than its New Hampshire namesake, but fails to have an international airport or a Premier League football club.

Lots of census entries have places of birth just like these, with no county named, because EVERYBODY knew just where they were. The transcriptions correctly reflect this, but Ancestry's algorithm assigns the record to Ancestry's "favourite" place without reference to the country where the record originates.

A typical Ancestry user doesn't check what their system has filled in. Only a small minority of us seem to correct things before moving on.

[Erato]

I don't know about Ancestry, since I don't have a subscription, but FamilySearch favors Birmingham, West Midlands, England, United Kingdom over any other Birmingham when I do a general search for Smith in Birmingham.  There are 245 pages of results; I looked at the first five pages and there was no mention of Birmingham, Alabama.  Similarly, a search for Smith in Manchester places Manchester, Greater Manchester, England, United Kingdom first; no sign of Manchester, NH in the first five pages.

[coombs]

Start typing in Somerset and the drop down menu may come up with Somalia for a split second when you have typed the "Som".

When I type in Sussex, I often get Sussex, Delaware, United States. Or Kent, Ohio as opposed to Kent, England.

[BrazilianBombshell]

There's a Pennsylvania Castle in Dorset.