[Nhcoll-l] difficult locality label

[Douglas Yanega]

While curating today, I came across a fair-sized series of specimens 
with one of those locality labels that make you pull out your hair. It 
typifies most of the worst of this sort of label, in its combination of 
useless vagueness (the only recognizable place name is the country) and 
hopeless specificity (it gives the name of a privately-held property, 
rather than a town or some other place name that would appear on a map).

To wit:

ZAMBIA

“Amorotis Farm"

15.ii.1972, S.C. Cruickshank

Host: on citrus

Don't bother Googling; either the farm name is badly misspelled, or it 
is no longer extant, and has never been recorded in a document that is 
on the web. There is also a Mr. S.A. Cruickshank who works with farmers 
in Zambia, but that's a different person entirely.

It's not crucial for us to know more precisely (for genetic work, just 
Zambia is probably sufficient), but it seems a shame to have the 
*potential* to know exactly where these specimens are from but be 
compelled to exclude them from georeferencing (a point with an error 
radius of 700 kilometers is really more likely to confuse people than be 
helpful, as so few people check error radii when consulting online records).

A disproportionate number of the specimen records of this general nature 
in our collection are from ranches or farms, from many different 
countries, and even within the US. They are, not surprisingly, almost 
impossible to track down once they change hands or go defunct (e.g. "6 
mi W Stanton Ranch HQ, Santa Cruz Island", which is not helpful when the 
ranch was a few miles in diameter and the few buildings were razed or 
repurposed decades ago), and not always trivial to locate even if still 
operating.

Asking here is a long shot, but I'd also be curious as to any tricks 
people might know for this type of locality (ranches and farms), even if 
it doesn't solve this particular case. I do know, and make frequent use 
of, the Fuzzy Gazetteer (http://isodp.hof-university.de/fuzzyg/query/), 
but that's more useful for mistranscriptions or bad handwritten labels. 
For those of you unfamiliar with it, it's a very helpful tool.

Thanks,

-- 
Doug Yanega      Dept. of Entomology       Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314     skype: dyanega
phone: (951) 827-4315 (disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
              https://faculty.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html
   "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
         is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/nhcoll-l/attachments/20220214/707dc3e4/attachment.html>