GNIS National Map Boundaries? – December 19, 2022 at 11:58PM

Hello! I need some assistance looking for polygon boundaries for areas that are place names. Quick background, I was given a list of areas to find circa 2011. Of course, where the data came from was a mystery but I did my to trace back to the USGS Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) as possibly the reference point.

The names in question occur within the USGS National Map and fall under the Populated Places dataset. This dataset contains only point data, but I am trying to find a general outline of the boundary estimates for these places. A great example of this is Balboa Island, CA. Balboa Island is located within the City of Newport Beach, CA – but the Orange County and Newport Beach GIS portals don’t define a boundary for this area. The island itself if a very easy to define area, but just across the way on the peninsula is Balboa, CA which is hard to define where it splits into its own “area”. Clearly the places have some type of defined region, but I just cannot find any quasi authoritative resource to get polygon boundaries. Any help would be greatly appreciated, and I may be open to pulling OSM data into QGIS to extract boundaries if that’s possible with these areas. Some areas such as Balboa Island are drawn as polygons but if I search Balboa, CA in OSM, it only comes up with a hamlet point. Considering I have 150 records to define/digitize I’m trying to avoid that.

Let me know your thoughts or if you have any ideas!

USGS GNIS

Balboa Screenshot