A key goal of the LINCS project (Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship) is to create pathways between datasets while preserving both the nuances intrinsic to humanities data and the research questions that have produced diverse datasets. Our work of aligning the gazetteers of the Map of Early Modern London and REED London Online (the “MoEML-RLO Gazetteer Alignment project”) invites us to confront the major conceptual challenges that come with merging and connecting data across projects. MoEML is a descriptive gazetteer and map platform with drawing tools, finding aids, and toponymically rich texts. RLO makes discoverable a broad collection of London-centric archival materials referring to performance, music, and theatre. Our projects, with their overlapping but distinct spatial and temporal scope, offer a fruitful opportunity to test the real interoperability of two datasets.