locale · official boundary
Quincy
A populated place entered on the federal register of geographic names as feature 617701 in Norfolk County, Massachusetts. The name is the one the United States Board on Geographic Names has recorded; what the place is called locally is filed separately as an attested claim.
A populated place entered on the federal register of geographic names as feature 617701 in Norfolk County, Massachusetts. The name is the one the United States Board on Geographic Names has recorded; what the place is called locally is filed separately as an attested claim.
Place
official layer
An official boundary, promulgated by an authority with the power to draw it. It is not amended by anything on the vernacular layer.
- Type
- locale
- Authority
- United States Board on Geographic Names
- GNIS feature
617701
Questions this record answers
Each answer is composed only from fields this record carries, and names the attestation for what it says. A question the record cannot answer from its own attested content is not asked here. Where a boundary is described as official it was promulgated by an authority with the power to draw it and is not amended by anything on the vernacular layer; where it is described as vernacular it is held by attestation alone and amends no official boundary.
Where is Quincy, and what does the archive hold for it?
Quincy is a populated place. The archive holds NO BOUNDARY for it — only a point. Where a source registers a name and a location and draws no outline, the archive records the point and says so, rather than implying an extent nobody drew.
Attested by: USGS Geographic Names Information System — Domestic Names, Massachusetts, retrieved 2 September 2026, under United States Government Work — public domain.
Who recorded the name Quincy?
United States Board on Geographic Names recorded it, as feature 617701 on the federal register of geographic names. What that authority standardises is the NAME, not an extent: it drew no boundary, and the archive holds none.
Attested by: USGS Geographic Names Information System — Domestic Names, Massachusetts, retrieved 2 September 2026, under United States Government Work — public domain.
What is the federal feature identifier for Quincy?
GNIS feature 617701, carried in this record's provenance from the USGS Domestic Names file at accession. The archive surfaces it; it does not infer it.
Attested by: USGS Geographic Names Information System, domestic feature 617701. USGS Geographic Names Information System — Domestic Names, Massachusetts, retrieved 2 September 2026, under United States Government Work — public domain.
What else does the world call Quincy?
The archive reconciles this record to USGS Geographic Names Information System (617701). Each identity carries the method that produced it. 2 further candidates were considered and refused, and they are named on this page under “candidates the archive declined” — a refusal nobody can see is indistinguishable from never having looked.
Attested by: 617701 — USGS GNIS domestic feature id 617701, decided 3 September 2026 by archive-ingest 0.1.0
What does the archive hold for Quincy, and under what licence?
The Boston Archive holds this record of Quincy from USGS Geographic Names Information System — Domestic Names, Massachusetts, retrieved 2 September 2026, under United States Government Work — public domain (public domain). 4 recorded transforms stand between the retrieved bytes and this record. Attribution is due to United States Geological Survey.
Attested by: USGS Geographic Names Information System — Domestic Names, Massachusetts, retrieved 2 September 2026, under United States Government Work — public domain.
This record, elsewhere
Identities the archive asserts, each named with the method that produced it. Candidates the archive could not settle are held in the reconciliation ledger and are shown below, under candidates the archive declined, and in the reconciliation ledger. Each method is stated in full — the procedure, the value it was compared against, and the date it was decided — in this record's machine rendering.
- USGS Geographic Names Information System —
617701Method: gnis-feature-id-recorded-at-accession · Matched against: USGS GNIS domestic feature id 617701 · Decided 3 September 2026
Candidates the archive declined
Identities that were considered and not asserted. They are published here rather than merely filed, because a refusal nobody can see is indistinguishable from never having looked. A candidate is HELD where the archive could not settle it and DECLINED where it could — and a wrong sameAs is worse than none. Every verdict is in the reconciliation ledger.
- Wikidata —
Q49143· held — the archive could not settle itMatched against: wdt:P590 = 617701 on Q49143 (Quincy)Why: Held, not asserted: 2 records of this archive answer to this identifier, and it is asserted on /place/city-of-quincy — the archive's principal record for the place, which holds a boundary where this one holds a point or a less specific extent. This record is tied to it by an internal same_as relation. Asserting the identifier here as well would instruct a consumer to merge two records the archive deliberately keeps apart.Method: wikidata-p590-exact-identifier-join · Decided 3 September 2026 - English Wikipedia —
Quincy,_Massachusetts· held — the archive could not settle itMatched against: schema:about Q49143 ; schema:isPartOf en.wikipediaWhy: Held, not asserted: 2 records of this archive answer to this identifier, and it is asserted on /place/city-of-quincy — the archive's principal record for the place, which holds a boundary where this one holds a point or a less specific extent. This record is tied to it by an internal same_as relation. Asserting the identifier here as well would instruct a consumer to merge two records the archive deliberately keeps apart.Method: wikidata-sitelink · Decided 3 September 2026
Related records
- same as — City of Quincy
Identity
- Identifier
- urn:lemay:boston:entity:quincy-2
- Canonical URL
- https://boston.fyi/place/quincy-2
- As JSON
- https://boston.fyi/place/quincy-2.json
- Version
- 1 · last changed 2 September 2026
Provenance
- Source
- USGS Geographic Names Information System — Domestic Names, Massachusetts — source of record
- Licence
- United States Government Work — public domain (public_domain)
- Retrieved
- 2 September 2026
- Source identifier
- 617701
- Attribution
- United States Geological Survey
- Rights as stated
- A work of the United States government; not subject to copyright protection within the United States (17 U.S.C. § 105).
Transform ladder
| # | Operation | Description | Tool |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | fetch | retrieved the Domestic Names file for Massachusetts from the USGS staged-products endpoint | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 2 | decompress | inflated the pipe-delimited names member from the ZIP container | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 3 | filter | selected features in Suffolk County or mapped on a Boston quadrangle, by the federal record's own county and map fields | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 4 | normalize | the federal feature name became the record title unaltered; the decimal coordinates were carried across as a point, not a boundary | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |