Chapman code
3-letter code used in genealogy
Chapman codes are a set of 3-letter codes used in genealogy to identify the administrative divisions in the United Kingdom, Ireland, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands.
Use
They were created by the historian Colin R Chapman in the late 1970s, intended to provide a widely used shorthand in genealogy which follows the common practice of describing areas in terms of the counties existing in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Other uses
Chapman codes have no mapping, postal or administrative use. They can however be useful for disambiguation by postal services where a full county name or traditional abbreviation is not supplied after a place name which has more than one occurrence, a particular problem where these are post towns such as Richmond. Many Chapman codes are also used in ISO 3166-2:GB, where they are prefixed with the country code GB-.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chapman code” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.