I've been carrying out research on several 'non-PARRY' branches of my own family during this past month, and there's been very little progress specifically about PARRYs, or for the wider One-Name Study, so this will be quite a short update.
On the 15th March, I attended the Malvern Family History Show. It was lovely to catch up with numerous members of the Guild of One-Name Studies, who were either there helping with the Guild stand, or on other family history society stands, presenting talks, or just having a day out, as I was.
But I didn't take any photos, not even the lovely view of the hills in the sunshine, as we queued just before the show opened, which I now regret!
One of the aims of a One-Name Study is to develop "added value", going beyond the stories of individual families, in order to draw conclusions about the surname itself1. One topic that I had hoped to write about this month concerns the frequency and distribution of the PARRY surname in British censuses. Back in 2005, when my web site was still available, I had collected some preliminary information relating to the numbers of PARRYs in the censuses from 1851 - 1901, and created the following image, giving some indication of how the surname distribution had changed over those years:
I'd also produced an attempt at mapping a modern (2002) distribution of the surname, which is available on the PARRY study profile, at https://one-name.org/name_profile/parry/ .
In the years since those were produced, the data for the other British censuses (1841, 1911, and 1921), as well as for the 1939 Register, has become available, and I have made a start on collecting the information from those, so that I can produce a more complete sequence of map images.
But things are never simple, are they?
One would think that it should be a fairly straightforward task, to do an exact search for the surname PARRY in the various genealogical databases, obtain totals per county, and then create the maps.
But, no, it isn't!
I knew there was likely to be some differences between the totals provided by different companies - it is rare that they have been able to use data for a census that has already been transcribed. So they have all undertaken their own transcription process, and therefore show differences due to the way the surname has sometimes been transcribed.
Even if they had been able to use an 'already transcribed' dataset, as might have been possible with the 1881 census, which was initially transcribed in a joint project between the Federation of Family History Societies (now the Family History Federation), and the Genealogical Society of Utah, over the years, as users submit corrections to whichever company they might have searched in, the datasets would develop differences. (Although one might hope that this would eventually lead to a coalescing of the totals, as all the mistakes get picked up and corrected.)
But when you discover that the individual county totals from a particular company, when added together, don't even match the overall total that company shows for the census, then you realise a lot more work is going to be needed to obtain even moderately accurate figures!
I think some of the issues are to do with registration districts that overlap county boundaries, and therefore get included within both individual counties. There are also variations in how the companies treat individual counties (for example, why does TheGenealogist lump Huntingdonshire and Rutland figures together? They might be small counties, but they don't even border on each other.)
Clearly, I need to do a lot more investigation before I can draw any conclusions, and post some updated distribution maps.
Notes and Sources
1. About One-Name Studies: https://one-name.org/one-name-studies/
