Claim · the grey record
Boston — formerly “Shawmut”
An attested claim that Boston was formerly named “Shawmut”. The name of the peninsula before the English settlement. Attested by the English Wikipedia article on Boston. The archive records the attestation; it does not rule on it.
Boston was formerly named Shawmut
This is an attestation. The archive records who asserts it, since when, and on what evidence. It does not rule on whether it is true.
- Subject
- Boston
- Predicate
former_name- Attested by
- English Wikipedia
- Attestor kind
- reference work
- Attested since, as stated
- as at the date of retrieval
- Attestation strength
- attested — a count of independent attestations, never a truth value
- Variant note
- The name of the peninsula before the English settlement.
Evidence
English Wikipedia, “Boston”, retrieved 2 September 2026
Boston was founded on Shawmut Peninsula in 1630 by English Puritan settlers, who named the city after the market town of Boston, Lincolnshire, England.
· source
Other attestations of the same assertion
These are variants, not corrections. They are listed unranked and unresolved; the archive does not choose between them.
Boston was formerly named Blackstone
Attested by Samuel Adams Drake (folklorist) since 1884 · single source
Boston was formerly named Shawmut
Attested by Samuel Adams Drake (folklorist) since 1884 · single source
Related records
- about — Boston
Identity
- Identifier
- urn:lemay:boston:claim:boston-former-name-shawmut
- Canonical URL
- https://boston.fyi/claim/boston-former-name-shawmut
- As JSON
- https://boston.fyi/claim/boston-former-name-shawmut.json
- Version
- 1 · last changed 2 September 2026
Provenance
- Source
- English Wikipedia — source of record
- Licence
- Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (open)
- Retrieved
- 2 September 2026
- Source identifier
- Boston
- Attribution
- Wikipedia contributors, CC BY-SA 4.0
- Rights as stated
- Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
Transform ladder
| # | Operation | Description | Tool |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | fetch | retrieved the plain-text extract of the attesting article from the MediaWiki API | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 2 | verify | searched the article text for the name at a word boundary; a candidate the source did not contain was refused and the refusal recorded | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 3 | quote | took the first sentence containing the name, unaltered, as the evidence for this claim | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |