We had a new topic for HQRL on Thursday, “One-Name Studies.” Our speaker began by reminding us that we have probably all been fascinated by our own names and that is not unusual. Have you ever traveled and looked through the phone book for surnames that you recognized or googled your name long before AI and any interest in family history? I was glad to know that I wasn’t weird when I did that. 

One-name studies attempt to find all the surnames you may have whether they connect to you or not. By looking for all incidence of a surname, you may find a connection you didn’t know about or explain a non-connection that you were struggling with. To me there is another point that he made that I think is relevant and key to why it would be good to join a one-name study: collaboration. There are several ways to get involved with these studies and from what I can tell they all include collaboration. 

WikiTree has one-name studies that you can contribute to and ask questions of. Guild of One-Name Studies is another site. These sites and others often ask you to help confirm information so that the trees are accurate. What sources do you have that can help support a line? There are also Family Association sites that often send newsletters or have reunions or all sorts of activities. My experience as an educator tells me that like other resources, some are better than others, so my recommendation is to look at the groups carefully. Do they answer your inquiries? Do they support their thinking with facts, documentation, etc? 

I recently connected with a family historian to help me unscramble a part of my tree that I wrote about earlier, a family from N. Ireland that came to America from Londonderry and seemed to become Quakers once here. When I connected with him, he had done a lot of research on the one-name study he was working on and sent me a 140 page draft of a book he is writing. In the process he was able to explain the reason the family left N. Ireland, why they were in N. Ireland in the first place, how they connected with the Quakers and as it turned out, why the children kept marrying within the same surname. I won’t go into all the history (remember I said it was a 140 page draft) but lets just say the surname had been banned and they changed their surname to keep from being executed and they weren’t all changed in the same way. Look, isn’t family history hard enough!!!

Connecting surnames to surname distribution maps like ISOGG Wiki can be interesting as well or even looking at DNA results and I know that at least on Ancestry it will tell me the potential migratory patterns of that DNA then combine that with history and surname info and perhaps you will find a way to get through that brick wall or just find interesting facts about you family lives.

Another new topic for us will be coming on November 5, “Collateral & Cluster Research”  and the last one for the year is the rescheduled class on the “Occasional Genealogist.” 

See you in class!

Heidi Geise, education@hqrl.com