Your points are well taken, but as someone who has had to deal with this business of the legal boundaries of municipal governments throughout my working years I can assure you that there are no absolute rules, even in the USA. Carl speaks about Towns being a shortened form of Township. Well, perhaps, someplaces. However in Pennsylvania, most of the state is divided into counties, subdivided into townships and cities -- but rarely conforming to the square messurements cited. However there is one glaring anomaly: Bloomsburg is indeed a "town", not a township. It was for all the years I resided and worked in Pennsylvania a place that prided itself on being the only "town" in the state. Cathy, you are correct that in New York City, the five bouroughs indeed were formally counties. And while the formal county structure there was largely aboished many decades ago, some of the "county functions" are indeed still carried on by the boroughs. Unfortunately I no longer have the desk references which were essential to my work when I worked for the State of New York, but I can assure you that there exist several instances of "villages" which span across two towns. That is, the village geographically includes land from two towns. In fact there is at least one instance where the two towns are indeed in two different counties. And there is at least one instance of a village including land in three different towns. And as we all might expect, there are multitudes of municipal services provided by each of these entities, and there is absolutely no standard that determines which ones are handled by which level of government... and that includes the registries of all those facts that genealogists care about. A good example is in the adjacent town to me Nassau, Rensselaer County, NY. It already had a village of Nassau for the business centre area, but just recently the village of East Nassau was carved out. As far as any objective observer can deteremine, the only reason was to establish local zoning to block the opening of a sand/gravel mining operation. With few other exceptions they still rely on the Town of Nassau for essentially all other services.
Massachusetts, just a about three years ago officially abolished county government ... but left some county structures in place, and you can be sure the tourist and economic development folks have not abandoned the concept. And the records offices are still housed in the old county court building. Again, what services and what legailities are still "county" related and which are not is a muddle to keep the lawyers employed and family researchers confused.
So Legacy folks, there's no way even in just those three states that you can have absolute system whatever structure your database ends up with.
-Dick
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