Have you ever filled out a form online where you had to select a country and you noticed that one of the country options was United States minor outlying islands?

If you have you might have, what are those islands?

Who lives there?

And why are those islands considered so minor?

Learn more about the United States minor outlying islands

and how they ended up on almost every drop-down list of countries

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I'll start off talking about the U.S. minor outlying islands by explaining what they are not. These islands are not the populated U.S.

territories. So in other words it is not Puerto Rico, not Guam, not American Samoa, not the U.S. Virgin Islands or not the Northern Mariana Islands.

These territories are all categorized separately.

The minor outlying islands specifically refers to nine islands which are all U.S. territories.

Eight of them are in the Pacific and one is in the Caribbean.

These are sorts of the crumbs of the United States. The Caribbean

island is called Navassa. It's about two square miles in area and it's located

roughly between Haiti, Jamaica and Cuba.

There has never been a long-term human presence on the island.

There is some guano mining in the 19th century

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