How this was built

What the source is

The U.S. Board on Geographic Names is the federal body that decides the official name of American geographic features. Its Domestic Names Committee publishes a Quarterly Review List of every proposal pending before it. Each list is a PDF containing full case files: the proposed name, who proposed it, the coordinates, the feature, the proponent's stated reasoning, often quoted directly, and which governments and Tribes were consulted.

The Board has purview over natural topographic and hydrographic features, reservoirs, canals, channels, crossings, levees and unincorporated populated places. It does not decide the names of incorporated cities and towns, Census designated places, civil divisions, ZIP codes or administered land areas.

Scope, and why it stops where it does

This database covers Review Lists 450 through 464, posted February 6, 2023 through July 16, 2026. That is 493 proposals across 47 states and territories.

The cutoff is a data-quality decision. Every proposal in lists 450 and later opens with a literal Proposal Information heading followed by a structured label/value block, which is what the parser splits on. Lists 442 through 449 use an earlier layout: compact semicolon-delimited paragraphs with no case numbers and different field names. Those older lists could have been parsed loosely, but the fields would not line up with the modern ones, so they are excluded.

How the parsing works

• Each review list PDF is downloaded from the USGS content host and read with PyMuPDF.
• Proposals are split on the Proposal Information heading rather than on PDF bookmarks, because the bookmark structure changes three times across this date range and in one list a single proposal's title is split across four separate bookmarks.
• Within each proposal, a known set of field labels is matched on its own line, and the lines that follow, up to the next label or section heading, become the value.
• Each block is truncated where the next proposal's title begins, so a case summary cannot absorb the following entry.
• Records are de-duplicated on the Board's case number where one exists.
• The build fails rather than publishing if any in-scope list yields zero proposals, or if the total falls below 300.

Proposals are not the same as names

Each review list states a count on its cover page. Those counts are names, not proposals, and a single proposal can carry several names. List 458 announces 69 names; it contains 35 proposals, several of which rename a cluster of connected features at once. The per-list numbers below show both, so the gap is visible rather than hidden.

Titles, and where they are reconstructed

A proposal's title is normally the heading the Board prints above it. In 29 of the 493 records that heading grab ran into surrounding narrative, usually in the older lists, so the title was rebuilt from the structured fields instead — "Change X to Y" or "New name Y". Those records carry a title_synthesized flag in the data. Two blocks that contained no identifying content at all were parsing artifacts and are dropped, which is why the total is 493 rather than 495.

Eight proposals rename a whole cluster of features at once and use a plural Proposed names field; their titles are shown as "New names: A, B, C and N more". Their Board case numbers are ranges, like 6402-6411.

What is in each record

Proposed name, current official name where the proposal is a change, proposal type, proponent, date proposed, Board case number, GNIS ID, feature class, feature size, a plain description of where the feature is, county, state, coordinates, land ownership, the USGS topographic quadrangle, the recorded name history, the full case summary, other names found during research, and the list of stakeholders consulted.

488 of the 493 proposals carry usable coordinates and appear on the map. The remaining 5 are listed but not plotted.

Categories, and how they were assigned

• New (285), Change (147) and Local name made official (61) come from the proposal's own title and its stated proposal type. Features in the third group already carry a name locally, and the Board is being asked to make that name the official federal one. They are neither new coinages nor renamings.
• Commemorative is set when the Board's own proposal type contains "commemorative."
• Offensive or derogatory is set when the Board's proposal type says the name is considered offensive or derogatory. It is the Board's characterization, not one added here.
• Tribal or Indigenous is the one derived tag: it is set by keyword match against the case summary for terms such as tribe, tribal, nation, Indigenous and named languages and peoples. It is a search aid and will both over- and under-count. Do not cite it as a statistic.

Language in the records

Some proposals seek to replace names that are slurs. The case summaries reproduce those names because the record is about them. Text appears here exactly as the Board published it, including the Board's own redactions, which it applies to some terms and not others. Nothing was sanitized or added.

What this does not tell you

• Outcomes. These are pending or recently reviewed proposals, not decisions. A proposal appearing here has not necessarily been approved, rejected or acted on. Approved names go into the Geographic Names Information System within three to four days of the Board's monthly meeting; this database does not track that step.
• Everything before February 2023, for the schema reason above.
• Foreign and Antarctic names, which a separate Board committee handles.

Rebuilding it

The parser is parse_bgn.py in this repository. It downloads nothing on its own; point it at a folder of review-list PDFs named list_<number>.pdf and it writes bgn_raw.json. The Board posts a new list roughly every quarter, in January, April, July and October.

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