PerProject:Reliability of GNIS data there are many (sub)stub articles on Indiana places that have been created sourced to GNIS entries.A lot of them falsely designate things as "unincorporated communities", which is several GNIS importers' catch-all equivalent to the GNIS catch-all feature classification code "populated place".GNIS has many errors, and all of these (sub)stubs need cleanup.
As of March 2025 only a minority of the counties in Indiana have had their county histories located and properly cited, with links to (in the case of the 19th century histories) where they can be read via theHathiTrust or theInternet Archive.
You can help complete this task.
Some GNIS records cite this atlas as their source, which can be checked directly to see what it is an article is likely actually about:
Several of the "populated places" that the GNIS compilers took from this atlas (e.g.452234) are little red-coloured pictures of envelopes, clearly denoting post-offices.The legend at the start of the atlas also explains the symbols for schools, blacksmith's, and so forth.
Ronald L. Baker is often cited as a supporting source in many 2-sentence or 3-sentence GNIS "unincorporated community" articles.Not only does Baker usually say explicitly that things are villages, hamlets, or post-offices; but Baker is often erroneously cited saying that somethingwas a post-office, or that there was a post-office at a railway station, to support a statement that a non-existent settlementhad a post-office.
Some of theFederal Writer's Project sources that Baker cites (which xe explains are the Manuscript Files of the Federal Writers' Project, Cunningham Memorial Library,Indiana State University, Terre Haute) can be checked directly, and it is important to cross-check Baker against at least 1 other source.
The history of the FWP files is explained at
In addition to the national-scope gazetteers on the general resources page, there are some state-wide gazetteers:
Polk published gazetteers regularly.This is not an exhaustive list.