Online Gazetteers
Columbia Gazetteer of the World
The Columbia Gazetteer's Advanced Search page provides comprehensive tools for locating and organizing information about the places covered in the Gazetteer in a variety of ways. Users can combine place-name or full-text searching with metadata elements on the entries, or just by metadata categories.
ePodunk
Information on US counties, cities, towns, communities and podunks.
Geographical Names Board of Canada
In Canada, since 1897, names on official, federal government maps have been authorized through a national committee, now known as the Geographical Names Board of Canada (GNBC).
Geographic Names Information System (GNIS)
The Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) is the Federal and national standard for geographic nomenclature. The U.S. Geological Survey developed the GNIS in support of the U.S. Board on Geographic Names as the official repository of domestic geoprahic names data, the offivial vehicle for geographic names use by all departments of the Federal Government, and the source for applying geographic names to Federal electronic and printed products. The GNIS contains information about physical and cultural geographic features of all types in the U.S., associated areas and Antaectica, current and historical, but not including roads and highways.
Gesher Galicia: The Bridge to Galicia
This website contains a list of historic town names that were in the province of Galicia (Austria-Hungary) that today are in either Poland or Ukraine. Click on the name to see a "town overview" that lists the modern name, the Jewish Kehilla (Community) District name, latitutde and longitude, maps etc.
Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names Online
TGN is a structured vocabulary currently containing around 1,106,000 names and other information about places. Names for a place may include names in the vernacular language, English, other languages, historical names, names and in natural order and inverted order. Among these names, one is flagged as the preferred name.
JewishGen Communities
This database contains information on approximately 6,000 Jewish communities in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa in various languages, and political jurisdictions during different time periods.
Kartenmeister
A comprehensive database of name changes for Eastern European towns. It contains 9,300+ locations with over 38,700+ name changes once and 5,500+ twice and more. All locations are EAST of the Oder and Neisse Rivers and are based on the eastern provinces in Spring 1918. Included in the database are the following provinces: East Prussia, including Memel, Westprussia, Brandenburg, Posen, Pomerania and Silesia.
Maplandia
Maplandia.com provides the searchable world gazetteer based on Google Maps, the most comprehensive online satellite imagery ever available. More than 2,000,000 places all over the world are divided into many geographical categories according to continents, countries and administrative regions.
NGA GEOnet Names Server (GNS)
The Geographic Names Server is the official repository of standard spellings of all foreign place names, sanctioned by the United States Board on Geographic Names. The database also contains variant spellings (cross-references), which are useful for finding purposes. All the geographic features in the database contain information about location, administrative division, and quality.
US Census Bureau gazetteer
Information for US places, counties, county subdivisions, census tracts, and ZIP Code Tabulation Areas (ZCTAs).