I question the Long Island City place of death

Question

I keep seeing Long Island City as a place of birth, marriage, death in  early Long Island families such as King, Swasey, Hallock.

These are families which settled in the Town of Southhold at the eastern end of Long Island.  Long Island City is on the western tip of Long Island, about 100 miles away and I don't think it even existed that early.

Answer 1

I don't do much American research, but I know in the UK, often the BMDs are registered in a central area, and, though on an actual BMD cert you would get the actual location, for administrative purposes most of the records report the registration location. So possibly LIC was the local registration area for Long Island. 

From Wikipedia: 

"Long Island City, as its name suggests, was formerly a city, created in 1870 from the merger of the Village of Astoria and the hamlets of Ravenswood, Hunters Point, Blissville, Sunnyside, Dutch Kills, Steinway, Bowery Bay and Middleton in Newtown Township. It was a separate city until 1898."

Comments

The communities named in the Wikipedia quote are and were in Queens County.  Between the original border of Queens County (now the border of Nassau County which separated the eastern part of Queens in 1898) and the Town of Southhold, fall the north shore Suffolk County Towns of Huntington, Smithtown, Brookhaven and Riverhead today.  In the 17th and early 18th centuries, settlement was heaviest in Queens and Brooklyn at the western end of Long Island and Southhold and Southhampton on the east end.  Births, deaths and marriages were not registered by municipal authorities, but by the churches which recorded them. Although there was contact and travel between the eastern and western Long Island Towns (called Townships in most other states), the people of Southhold related more closely with the colonies of New England than they did with the western Long Island settlements.  All of that put together is why I question the Long Island City references.  I think the person who first entered that information really just meant "Long Island."

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Ah, I see. What could be happening is when the profile is created in Ancestry.com (or another program) there is an "auto" add or correct (or suggest) function for the place names. I know in the software I use, it wants to geographically identify the place name, and it uses only modern ones. So every entry that I have for St. John Horsleydown, for instance, shows up as an error. If I want to geo-correct it, I have to change the name to St. Olave. But if I didn't know that was the new name of that area, I might choose something completely different, like, for example, Long Island City - which to someone thousands of miles away, may well seem like a reasonable modern day name for Long Island. That's my guess, anyway.

If you have evidence for the location that contradicts the original, by all means correct the place name and document your source.

And have fun!

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That does seem like a likely scenario.  I will have to fix each merged profile as I come upon it because the merge on the one I was commenting on here picked up the Long Island City location, while the profile I'd uploaded had the correct one (to the best of my knowledge).