Question 27: For TRS under Mapping, can we enter or add “named” townships to the list if there is no other Locality detail, e.g. Lexington Twp, Section 8. [IZ-RDLP]

[rondlg]

Description:

There are close to 20 named townships in the dropdown, but wasn’t sure if those are being used correctly. To answer JJ question – It looks like the named townships in the dropdown were created by IT on behalf of Fossil Vertebrates back in 2014.

For IZ, there are over 200 records with a township name and section only. Normally we would enter a TRS if a complete string was provided, but didn’t know if we could enter “Lexington” in the Township field and then 8 in the Section field. In addition should we leave the township name in the Locality field or delete it and record it in the TRS Notes instead?

[rondlg]

Response:

HOMEWORK: Geology uses the TRS primarily at the moment. PM to do some investigation and report back at the next EMu user meeting.
Insects, fishes and inverts all use TRS data
PM from Wikipedia:
A township in some states of the United States is a small geographic area.
The term is used in three ways.

• A survey township is simply a geographic reference used to define property location for deeds and grants as surveyed and platted by the United States General Land Office (GLO). A survey township is nominally six by six miles square, or 23,040 acres.

• A civil township is a unit of local government, generally a civil division of a county. Counties are the primary divisional entities in many states, thus the powers and organization of townships varies from state to state. Civil townships are generally given a name, sometimes written with the included abbreviation "Twp".
  In most midwestern states, a civil township often corresponds to a single survey township, although in less populated areas, the civil township may be made up of all or portions of several survey townships. In areas where there are natural features such as a lake or river, the civil township boundaries may follow the geographic features rather than the survey township boundaries.

• A charter township, found only in the state of Michigan, is similar to a civil township. Provided certain conditions are met, a charter township is mostly exempt from annexation to contiguous cities or villages, and carries additional rights and responsibilities of home rule.

• Paul Mayer: “The Civil townships are the named townships and may or may not correspond to the survey township, so I recommend only using numbers in the TRS section”