The purpose of this page is to identify those communities that are closest to Sun Valley, on a County-by-County basis. To explain further, let's use the example from the Genealogy Helper Page for Sun Valley:
We have great-grandparents who lived in a small community in the southwest corner of their home county. During their lives, most hospitals were in the next county to the west. Almost all of the nearby churches and cemeteries were in the county to the south.
When doing our research, we make it a practice to expand our search by looking in neighboring counties in addition to the county in which they lived: their home county contained property and probate records; the county to the west contained birth and death records; the county to the south contained their burial records. If we hadn't checked the neighboring counties, we would have missed many valuable sources of information.
Please note that when we give a distance, it's a 'straight-line' distance from Sun Valley and not the distance if driven.<1>
If you're researching your genealogy, we hope that the following following information helps.
Our Gazetteer shows that there are 1,446 communities within 40 miles [64.4 km] of Sun Valley. Of these communities, 1,425 are located in counties other than Hancock County.
We usually exclude communities when we still need to verify their location,<2> but for the purpose of this page, we have included the unverified ('unver') and historic ('hist') communities.
After starting with the home county for Sun Valley (which is Hancock County), we list the counties in alphabetical order and for each of those counties, the closest communities are listed in order of their distance from Sun Valley. For the following list, only those counties that contain communities within 40 miles [64.4 km] are displayed.
Given the large number of communities that are located in Jefferson County (OH), we have limited the list to those within 19 miles [30.6 km] of Sun Valley (about 100 communities).
Given the large number of communities that are located in Allegheny County (PA), we have limited the list to those within 28 miles [45.1 km] of Sun Valley (about 100 communities).
Given the large number of communities that are located in Washington County (PA), we have limited the list to those within 25 miles [40.2 km] of Sun Valley (about 100 communities).
Our distances are not driving distances, but are calculated as a 'straight-line' (or point-to-point) distance from Sun Valley. A straight line distance ignores things like rivers, canyons, lakes, et cetera - it's truly a line drawn from Point A (ie- Sun Valley) to Point B.
Our distance measurements begin at a specific point in Sun Valley. The point that we are using is located at these GPS coordinates - Latitude: 40.4445, Longitude: -80.5681 [Map]. In this case, the coordinates for Sun Valley have been provided by the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS).
Our data comes from many sources and some sources are more dependable than others. When we add communities to our Gazetteer, we try to verify that we have the correct location for the community. We mark a community as 'Unverified' when we aren't confident about our data and want to do further checking.
We use the term 'Historic' broadly and it generally means that the community no longer exists. However, it can also mean that the community might still exist, but was larger or had a more 'official' existence in the past than it does now.
Since our Gazetteer contains over 100,000 communities, verifying everything is going to take time. If you find an error or can help us to improve our accuracy, please let us know.
Please keep in mind that we can not guarantee the accuracy or timeliness of the information
on this website, so use with care. We encourage you to double-check the information that is critical to you.
If you've found an error or have additional information that you would like to share,
please don't hesitate to write. Click here to contact us.