His Deeds Are Dust

I’ve been wanting to add more street and place names to the OpenStreetMap map of Alderney, but I’m mindful of two things:

1. Copyright problems with using other maps as references, and
2. The lack of street signs on many roads and lanes in Alderney, meaning you’re reliant on local knowledge.

Many of Alderney’s roads have (or had) names in the local form of French, and some are now being Anglicised. You only have to go back 50 years to find the High Street also being recorded as “Grande Rue”.

In an effort to dig up as many names as possible, and to find some consensus on spelling and usage of accents and apostrophes, I downloaded the last five years’ worth of minutes from committee meetings from the States of Alderney web site.

I’ve only just started processing them, but it is already clear that they will be more useful as a source of names than a decider of punctuation. I already have these results for one lane on the island:

Photographs of street signs will help here, but I guess they’ll only be useful if there isn’t a policy of leaving accents off. Anyway, it’s a start.

It may well be worth adding some markup to my local copies of the minutes (which may have to stay offline because they are also copyrighted, boo!), to clearly point out place names, road names and house names in them. That way, I’ll be able to see where I have gaps as the map starts getting populated.

Before I do too much more map editing, I’ll also be recording evidence for names on a wiki, Alderney Notes. I’d be interested to hear more about any out of copyright maps of Alderney or other good sources of place names.