I spent a very enjoyable day yesterday, meeting up with several of the local members of the Guild of One-Name Studies.
We discussed a variety of topics, including:
- the difficulty of identifying (or even realising!) what has happened in a case where someone marries a second spouse who has an identical name and birth year/parish to their first spouse,
- the availability of mother's maiden names in indexes such as the UK General Register Office,
- navigating the Guild's web site,
- what would happen to our study if we were to die today, and the various options for preserving our data on the Guild site, such as the Members' Websites project (https://one-name.org/the-members-websites-program-mwp/ ).
- how the Guild began and the background to some Guild projects, such as the Marriage Challenges and the Marriage Locator (https://one-name.org/marriage-locator/ ),
- what records are available to help with finding graves in a local cemetery.
In the course of chatting about data storage, and the types of files to keep, the question of the collection of 'Births, Deaths and Marriages' arose and was it worth keeping spreadsheets of these, now that the entries are so easily available on many sites. I think some One-Namers no longer collect them in that format, but I still see some benefits to doing so. They can help with keeping track of how 'complete' the study is. If additional information is added to the spreadsheet, to identify which entry relates to who, then that will also be helpful to future researchers, and (hopefully) save them from purchasing incorrect certificates, which is an important consideration with 'popular' surnames, where there might be several, identically named, registrations, in the same district, in one quarter.
I also think that the ease with which statistical tables, graphs, or distribution maps, can be produced from such spreadsheets, is another benefit. Producing, and publishing, such "added value" is one of the aims of carrying out a surname study, which takes it beyond just the "family history" of everyone with the surname.
The time together with the other members soon flew by - which might explain the title of this post.
Then again, it could be the only 'explanation' I have for not posting anything since 2020.
Or maybe, as a result of struggling to carry out some "non-Parry" research into the owners of a local historic house during the Tudor period, I've just got latin on my mind!
[* "I don't understand," according to Google Translate :-) ]
