Julie Goucher ~ Anglers Rest

Created by Julie Goucher, 2023

I am hopeful that the various posts over the course of the A-Z Challenge, which has been about surnames, surname research and registering a One-Name Study has been enjoyable and given you plenty of scope for ideas and thoughts.

You can see all the posts I have written about surname research HERE and there is a small list of other writings about One-Name Studies and surnames that featured under Writing about your One-Name Study

So what to do next if you are enthused about One-Name Studies and surnames:

• Visit the One-Name Studies website and perhaps
• Join the Guild of One-Name Studies and see what the organisation offers
• Sign up for the Pharos Course – Introduction to One-Name Studies the course runs over five weeks and you will broadly learn:
  • About One-Name Studies
    • History of One-Name Studies
    • Why have a One-Name Study
    • How suitable is my surname
    • Introduction to the Guild of One-Name Study
    • Getting started
  • Surnames and their history
    • How did surnames start?
    • An introduction to common meanings & deviations of British Surnames
      • Non-British surnames
    • Changes, spellings, deviations, Other pitfalls for the unwary
      • Deviants and Variants
    • Surname Distribution & Migration
    • Importance of individual surname studies
  • Core records you will need and information gathering
    • What are core records?
    • Civil Registration records and indexes in the British & Ireland
    • Indexes to the Census
    • Family Search, will indexes and other readily available indexes
    • Data Capture
    • Measuring your progress
    • Organising your One-Name Study 
  • Analysing and making sense of your data
    • Introduction to analysis
    • Designing spreadsheets
    • Family reconstruction
      • Software for a One-Name Study
    • Migration & linking people to places
    • Finding missing data
    • Drawing conclusions
  • Practical aspects of running your own One-Name Study
    • Registering a study with the Guild
    • Ethics
    • Data Protection
    • Publishing your study
      • Facebook Groups & pages
    • Preserving your study
    • Organising your time
• Purchase a copy of Seven Pillars of Wisdom: The art of a One-Name Study.
  • Available from the Guild

I teach all three of the Pharos surname and One-Name Studies courses and have two studies, one is a Surname whose origins are typically British and the other is for an Italian surname.

The chances are you have been undertaking a study and not necessarily realising that it is a One-Name Study, you can read more HERE. Whether you are new to the concept or have been undertaking a surname research project for a while why not consider your aims for your study.

The next Pharos Introduction course begins 9 July 2024 and you can sign up HERE

I hope you have enjoyed the A-Z series as much as I have enjoyed writing them. Over the course of the last month I have promised I would come back to several topics and plan to do that over the coming weeks.

Created by Julie Goucher, 2023

Once a genealogist has registered the surname with the Guild they agree to do essentially several things:

• Aim to make the study global
• Respond to all enquiries.

In fact the five broad principles can be seen here.

There is guidance for a study, the Guild has mentors and volunteers that will help guide you, answer questions and so forth. There is the book, Seven Pillars of Wisdom which was published by the Guild in 2012. There is a suite of courses available, all providing a mechanism to learn and develop.

• • Introduction to One-Name Studies course – a foundation for undertaking a study – learning about the numbers that reflect the people in your study, the history of surnames, and then drawing conclusions as to the history of your surname of interest.

• • Practicalities of a One-Name Studies course – focuses on tools that you can use in your study. I am often asked whether this should be taken first, or the Introduction course, and it is probably as broad, as it is long. If I was coming to this as a fairly new genealogists, or surname researcher, I would likely take both courses; they focus on different things and provide a rounded focus on researching a surname and developing a study.
• • Advanced One-Name Studies course – builds on the material learnt in the introduction course and is probably best taken when you have some time under your belt with a study. This provides the opportunity to create an article and for those who elect to, to have the article read and published in the Journal of One-Name Studies. 

Each time a course runs, students are invited to leave feedback. Feedback is important and provides a mechanism for me to develop the course, or perhaps create an additional paper. A recent addition, as a support document is guidance for developing, and building a study profile – you can download a copy HERE.

The details of your study are left up to you to decide – the core data, the storage of the data, when you go global etc. There is no prescriptive way and where you start may well depend on the origins of the surname.

I have stated several times that I research in three places at one

• • • Where I am (England)
    • Where my family originated (the surname is clearly Italian, and my own family are from Sicily)
    • Where they went (Italian migrated globally, but the key places are Argentina, United States and Australia. My own family line went to New York, Alabama and Louisiana, so those three states are my US focus).

Some members like to work on their studies in a more random approach and in some respects I like that too. If you decide to do this, I really recommend that you keep a research log, recording where what you have researched and your findings. If you do stop part way through a larger body of research you will be better placed, and able to pick up where you left off.

The One-Name Study that YOU register is YOURS, you decide how it is kept and maintained and consider the aims of your study. You work at your pace and enjoy the experience and research.

Created by Julie Goucher, 2023

The phrase X Marks the Spot is typical to denote where someone should sign their name or perhaps it denotes a pin mark on a map identifying where a particular location is.

So today I am going to chat about bringing to life the people who are in our own ancestral lines or people with whom we share no connection, but they bare the surname we are researching.

On occasions, when I am researching a family who appear in my One-Name Study I often have to remind myself that these were not my people, but fit into someone’s ancestry. So where do we stop researching?

Some One-Namer’s record the marriage between two people, one of whom appears in their study. Depending if the individual who bears the surname will depend on how far the line is followed. If the line is male it is easier to define, but a female poses a question and consideration.

The Guild offers no suggestion to this quandary and I personally follow the female line through to children and then what happens to those children. Sometimes there is a cross over between two studies, both registered with the Guild and in those instances I reach out to the other member and offer to do a reciprocal swap of information. That is one of the nicest things about the Guild – the friendly responses, connections and collaborations. To quote a former Chairman “members helping members” Families do often marry into each other, and sometimes more than once.

Whether these folk are our own ancestors or part of our study it is quite fascinating to follow someone’s life through their trials and tribulations and for us to attempt to understand all the details. If we are very lucky we connect with an ancestor of the person who perhaps shed further light on them or provide snippets of information.

Created by Julie Goucher, 2023

Whether you write articles, Tweets, Facebook posts or a blog you are writing and publicising your study and fulfilling at least three of the Seven Pillar’s of Wisdom: the Art of One-Name Studies, published by the Guild in 2012. The book is also available from Amazon in Kindle format.

In the last few years I have written more and more about my own studies, and in particular about my Orlando study, Italian research and about the broad genre of surnames and surname research.

Here are a few articles I have written (in reverse order):

• All the posts relating to Surnames and One-Name Studies on this site can be found HERE
• The Pharos Tutors – What is your Oldest Possession? ~ 10 February 2018
• Journal of the Guild of One-Name Studies – From a Single Name – Beginnings of an Italian One-Name Study ~ Vol 13, Issue 1, pp 30-32 ~ Jan-March 2018 (Awarded the Guild of Award of Excellence)
• Family Tree Magazine (UK) – Setting up a One-Name Study ~ October 2017, pp 22 – 24
• Family Tree Magazine (UK) Blog – How to start a One-Name Study ~ April 2017
• Family Tree Magazine (UK) – My Genetic Journey (Case study as part of a DNA Exclusive guide) ~ February 2017, pp 48-49

You have nothing to loose by writing about your surnames. You may even find a connection to your family or someone else researching the surname. In some cases, including my Orlando study, our One-Name Studies and surname research is bound together with a One-Place Study and perhaps our cultural heritage.

Created by Julie Goucher, 2023

The topic of variants and deviants is addressed in detail during the Introduction to One-Name Studies course. Essentially we have likely all come across variants and deviants to our surnames, even if we have not called them that.

Variants

For the purposes of my own One-Name Studies I have registered two variants for ORLANDO, these are ORLANDE and ORLANDA. For my BUTCHER study I registered just one, BUTCHERS. It is also worth pointing out that you do not need to register a variant and at the initial point of registering the surname Butcher I did not register a variant. I did so when I came across a divorce record in the name of Butchers in which the male stated that his name was Butcher and not Butchers.

When looking at my husband’s ancestry his early Goucher ancestors were recorded as Goacher. The Goucher surname was listed as a variant in the Goacher One-Name Study when it was registered by another member of the Guild of One-Name Studies. When the study was deregistered, following the death of the registrant, my husband registered the surname and listed Goacher as a variant. He also added several other variants, one of which is the topic of a forthcoming post.

Deviants

A deviant is a change of surname that happens inconsistently. In the case of the 1939 Register, my husband’s Grandmother, was recorded as GROUCHER.

Why do variants exist?

Accents, spelling and people writing what they think they hear rather than what they actually do – Goucher is a case in point and I regularly receive correspondence in the name of Goucher and Groucher. In a letter recently, I was referred to as Goucher and Goacher, within the same sentence and that is not all, the envelope was handwritten and addressed to Mrs Groucher!

In a time when not everyone could read and write it was very easy for the inconsistencies with the spelling to exist because the person writing the surname would not be corrected if the person could not read what was written down.

Those with “foreign” surnames might change their surname, to make themselves fit in more and I gave an example recently. Surnames that have spellings that are not familiar in one country might become changed over time, just to be easier to manage.

You might find this page on the Guild of One-Name Studies website useful as you consider your own surnames and their potential variants. Those of you who read this post from earlier in the year might find it useful to read it again and consider the potential variant I discovered. I will at some point write about this again and my hypothesis about this.

Created by Julie Goucher, 2023

Understanding our surnames is a really important element of any One-Name study. In much the same way as building a house, with the foundations first, a One-Name study is built and developed the same way.

In today’s post I am going to focus on Italian surnames and why they perhaps give us some insight.

There is nothing more frustrating than looking for your Italian ancestor on Census or document and where it says place of birth it simply says Italy. By understanding the surname, it perhaps gives us further clues.

Italian surnames are mostly derived from:

• Patronymics, meaning they are essentially from the male of the household, and that might include any variation to the name – such as Giovanni
• Geographical, based upon the place – such as Bulgari, Lazio, Sutera,
• Nicknames – and not always complementary ones – Grassi (big or fat), Forte (strong), Gambacorta (short leg), Gentile (Gentle)
• Occupational – Medici (Physician), Pastore (shepherd), Barbieri (barber)

Some spellings might determine a specific region:

• Those ending in isi as in Troisi, could indicate the family is from Neapolitan or Sicilian.
• Surnames ending aloro such as Favaloro are Sicilian surnames.
• Surnames ending igo such as Barbarigo are Venetian
• Those ending with utti such as Zanut are from Fiuli Venezia Giulia (on the border with Slovenia and Austria)
• Those ending iu such as Mongiu are Sardinian

Old records may also influence some surnames as they are converted from Latin to Italian and sometimes in to dialect. Later changes may have occurred as the are converted into English or Americanised – Giuseppe Pastore converts to Joseph or Joe Shepherd.

Those children who were foundlings often have a surname of the town where they were found, and were often stigmatised because of that. Later the ruling changed so that the children were given the name of another town, which of course didn’t help with the stigma issue either, especially if that surname did not exist significantly in the town. In these cases a DNA test might help.

We look at a number of the points raised here and especially over the last few posts (S for Synthesis and T for thinking about surnames) in the Introduction to One-Name Studies course.

Created by Julie Goucher, 2023

Over the next two days we are going to be thinking about surnames. In many ways, T & U are not only linked together, but also to S for Synthesis.

The main question is What does my surname mean? There are a number of key surnames and where they originate can determine what kind of surname they are. You can read an earlier post HERE.

I have two studies, one for the surname of Butcher which is an occupational name. The other is for the surname of Orlando which suggests it is a Patronymic surname with links to Roland and Rowland. I am not entirely happy with the conclusions that I have drawn about this surname, but over the coming weeks I will discuss it more here. Incidentally, both of my One-Name Studies sites are deep under construction, I have 30 years of paper to process!

My husband has a study for the surname of Worship which was the maiden name of his paternal grandmother, I have always felt that the surname was very much linked to either a post holder name, someone who was connected with the church in some way and, having searched the Clergy of the Church of England Database there are a number of Worship entries as you can see below and some of them are quite early.

• Worship, Benjamin (1764-1764)
• Worship, James (1577-1585)
• Worship, John (1591-1599)
• Worship, John Lucas (1817-1834)
• Worship, William Taylor (1822-1832)
• Worshipp, William (1618-1618)

By thinking about your surname you are building up a profile about the surname, it’s origins and focus. Those factors give a One-Name study a good grounding and are these are discussed in the Pharos introduction to One-Name Studies course and in the Guild publication, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the Art of a One-Name Study, available from the Guild

I’ll be back to tomorrow talking about….