This is great, thank you! It looks like mapping the Nipigon zone will be trickier than I thought, because some of those towns are on the far side of places bigger than Nipigon, like Sault Ste Marie. On Fri, 17 Jan 2020 at 02:01, Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
On 1/13/20 8:15 AM, Jeffery Nichols wrote:
I was also wondering whether anyone on your team has more data about what towns were part of America/Nipigon.
I got that data from my printed copy of the Shanks International Atlas. It contains hundreds of place names in Canada but does not sort them by time zone region. I just now looked in Shanks (4th edition) for place names beginning with "A" with the same time zone history as Nipigon (Shanks calls this Canada's region 35), and found the following:
Alfred Algoma Mills Algonquin Almonte Alvinston Appleton Apsley Arden Armstrong Armstrong Station Aroland Attawapiskat Auburn
The book has latitude and longitude for each of these entries. It would take some time to transcribe all this info (including B-Z) for all of Canada. Also, Shanks partitions the world into many more regions than tzdb does, because he doesn't have the 1970 cutoff that tzdb does. So he partitions Canada into 253 regions and there could be other Shankian regions that share Nipigon's post-1970 time zone history and would thus fall under America/Nipigon in tzdb.
With the above in mind, you could grab a copy of the book and get the data you need. Although the book is out of print, copies of the final (6th) edition can be found in libraries:
https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/76950459
https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1135266594
and used copies are for sale in various locations.
I misplaced my copy of the 6th edition during the 2011 astrologer lawsuit ruckus (it probably ended up with one of the attorneys I consulted), but I just now ordered a used copy so that I can more easily answer historical questions like yours in the future.
-- *Jeffery Nichols*, JD, MPA, MA