cape · official layer
Castle Island
A cape entered on the federal register of geographic names as feature 612890 in Suffolk 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
The official layer: what an authority with the power to draw a boundary has recorded. This record carries NO BOUNDARY — the authority entered a name, and the archive holds that and says so rather than implying an extent nobody drew.
- Filed by this archive as
- landform
- Authority
- United States Board on Geographic Names
- Within
- Boston
- GNIS feature
612890
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 Castle Island, and what does the archive hold for it?
Castle Island is recorded by the United States Board on Geographic Names as a cape, within Boston. 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 Castle Island?
United States Board on Geographic Names recorded it, as feature 612890 on the federal register of geographic names. What that authority standardizes 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 Castle Island?
GNIS feature 612890, 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 612890. 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 Castle Island?
The archive reconciles this record to USGS Geographic Names Information System (612890). Each identity carries the method that produced it. 1 further candidate was considered and refused, and it is named on this page under “candidates the archive declined”, each with its own reason — a decision nobody can see is indistinguishable from never having looked.
Attested by: 612890 — USGS GNIS domestic feature id 612890, decided 3 September 2026 by archive-ingest 0.1.0
What does the archive hold for Castle Island, and under what license?
The Boston Archive holds this record of Castle Island 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 did not assert here 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 —
612890Method: gnis-feature-id-recorded-at-accession · Matched against: USGS GNIS domestic feature id 612890 · 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 decision nobody can see is indistinguishable from never having looked. A candidate is DECLINED where the archive weighed it and refused it, and HELD where the archive asserts it nowhere on this record — most often because it is asserted on the archive's principal record for the same place, and asserting it twice would instruct a consumer to merge two records the archive deliberately keeps apart. Each row states which, in its own words. A wrong sameAs is worse than none. Every verdict is in the reconciliation ledger.
- Wikidata —
Q1438579· declinedMatched against: rdfs:label / skos:altLabel = Fort IndependenceWhy: name agrees but type does not: this record is filed in this archive's `landform` class, and Q1438579 is classed on Wikidata as fortMethod: label-type-geography within the P131=Q100 candidate pool · Decided 3 September 2026
Identity
- Identifier
- urn:lemay:boston:entity:castle-island
- Canonical URL
- https://boston.fyi/place/castle-island
- As JSON
- https://boston.fyi/place/castle-island.json
- Version
- 1 · last changed 2 September 2026
Provenance
- Source
- USGS Geographic Names Information System — Domestic Names, Massachusetts — source of record
- License
- United States Government Work — public domain (public_domain)
- Retrieved
- 2 September 2026
- Source identifier
- 612890
- 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 |