Filed twice under the same name

Why names repeat

None of these are duplicate filings — every row above is a separate record with its own coordinates, sources and claims. The names collide because American place-naming draws from a short shelf. 6 of the 27 groups are cemeteries, and the cemetery names are the Victorian consolation vocabulary: Mount Hope, Elmwood, Evergreen, Greenwood, Oak Hill, Woodland. Every state bought from the same catalog.

Another 9 groups are town and settlement files, and those collisions run the other way — West named after East. Virginia City exists in Nevada and Montana; Spokane is a living city in Washington and an abandoned camp in South Dakota; Chloride, Galena, Golden and Helvetia were dug or hoped into existence under names that were already taken. And the three Orpheum Theatres are not named after each other at all — Orpheum was a vaudeville circuit brand, so dozens of cities once had one, and three of them have a file here.

For the record this is a lookup hazard, not an error: a name alone does not identify a dossier, which is why every internal link on this page — and everywhere else in the archive — resolves by slug, locality attached.