Last weekend saw the annual conference of the Guild of One-name Studies, which was held in Liverpool. I would normally attend the conference in person but circumstances prevented it this year, so I was very grateful that the Guild had made it a hybrid event, with remote access to all of the talks, and specific Q&A sessions for the remote attendees, as well as several opportunities to 'get together' online.
Management of the online presentations was also handed over to members in the USA during Saturday night/Sunday morning, which permitted more topics to be covered over the weekend. I still need to catch up with a few of the overnight talks but everything I have watched so far has been interesting and informative.
Given Liverpool's role as a "gateway" to the world, for so many people over the years, it's no surprise that the talks covered topics such as migration, specifically of the Irish, the Welsh, and those from northern Europe who passed through the port, maritime records, the slave trade, and the Liverpool Home Children. Other talks connected to the area included the Liverpool court houses, the Lancashire cotton famine, and a potted history (with demonstrations) of clog dancing.
There were talks on topics such as DNA, and taking over, or passing on, a one-name study, as well as information about websites, such as Family Search, Name & Place, and FindMyPast.
In some ways, it is too early for me to write specifics from the talks (two & a half days of almost constant online does lead to feeling a bit "brain dead" ☺ ) but I thought I'd just highlight some of the things which particularly resonated with me during the event, as well as the initial follow-up that I have carried out.
"Internal migration" was one phrase - the fact that people often moved within their own countries, before they made a jump to another country. Since my own ancestors did a fair amount of "border-hopping" between Herefordshire and the South Wales counties before, in some cases, going abroad, this struck me as something I should pay more attention to.
This tied in neatly with the talk by Jen Baldwin, of FindMyPast, entitled "Telling their story is *our* story" with its emphasis on the fact that 'every story matters' - we're not just compiling names and dates etc (a habit it is easy to fall into, with a study of a relatively frequently occurring surname) but actually revealing the humanity of the people we write about, who they were, what they did and, where possible, the why of it, their hopes and their heartbreaks.
Perhaps I was biased by the fact I was clearing a few items from my mending pile, while watching the conference, but I wrote down two phrases that particularly stood out - "the rich tapestry of lives" and, from a different talk, "mending torn fabric." Again, they relate to filling in more about the people themselves, rather than just recording facts and figures.
Another talk I found thought provoking was Wayne Shepheard's, concerning the relevance of environmental factors, ie "Mother Nature", on people's decision to migrate. In the past, I've often tended to focus on economic, or family and health related reasons for movement, so it was good to be reminded to consider other issues.
There are two specific sites that I have so far looked up, as a result of the conference. The first one is the Slave Voyages site at https://www.slavevoyages.org/
There are several reasons why I followed this one up. I knew that there were a few Parrys who received compensation after the abolishment of slavery. Some years ago, I was also in touch with a Parry descendant who thought his ancestors had owned objects that might have had an African origin - but he'd never researched where the objects came from, or how his family had obtained them. Thirdly, from a book of Will abstracts, I know that a Parry was one time governor of Barbados. And finally, many years ago, I'd carried out research into a Parry family who used the middle name of "Colston" over many generations - potentially this might have been the maiden name of a wife in the late 1700s but, in 2020, when the statue of Edward Colston, a slave trader, was toppled into Bristol harbour, I did wonder whether there might have been some connection to him instead.
Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to search the whole site for any Parrys. I did do a quick search on google using '"parry" "slavevoyages.org"', which indicates there's probably ten pages on the site with a Parry mentioned, as well as numerous other sites containing both search terms.
So this is a topic I need to spend more time investigating.
The second site I've looked at is the 1950 census on FamilySearch. This was because Taneya Koonce mentioned in her talk on researching black family history that "race" was shown as a category in that census, and I wondered what that might reveal about any Parrys.
As you can see from the following image, it is possible to filter the 6,888 Parrys in the census by various racial terms which were in use in the 1950s - along with some other, rather puzzling, terms (eg "74", "2", "U" etc).
So far, I have only checked a few of the lowest numbered entries and it turned out many of those are errors, for example the "74" relates to an entry with no-one at home, which says "see sheet 74", the 74 just happening to be written in the column where race would be recorded.
Clearly there's a lot of work that needs to be done to correct the transcriptions, before one can even identify the relevant people, yet alone think of trying to write their stories.
But, just to sum up, I found the whole conference enjoyable and think it was a great idea to make it a hybrid event. Whilst there were a few technical (or administrative) issues, such as talks beginning before the remote broadcast time, or no-one knowing the separate password that was required to get into the Q&A sessions, in general everything seemed to run smoothly.
So, even though I will try to attend in person next time, I do hope the Guild will continue to use this format in the future, for the benefit of those members, throughout the world, who are unable to do so.
Notes
Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/
The story of the statue of Edward Colston: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Edward_Colston
Family Search 1950 census: https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/collection/4464515
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