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Any One-Name and surname research project will involve the collection of material, what I refer to as raw data.

Regardless of where your surname originated from or where you reside, to undertake a One-Name Study and register this with the Guild the study should be global and there is no pressure on how soon you go global.

So what follows below, in no particular order, are some global quick wins. Sites where you can acquire material from without a paying subscription, even if you acquire the material and do not process it immediately – there are some real gems and my Orlando study has benefited greatly by several of the sites.

• FreeBMD – General Registrars Office (GRO) of Birth, Marriage and Death indexes.
• Marriage Locator  – for Marriages England & Wales 1837-1911
• The National Archives (Kew, London)  – This site has made material available in some of the main subscription based sites in addition to their own site, with the availability to download a CSV file of the records in a particular data set, for example wills (1384-1858). The data sets online can be found here but there is significant amounts of data at TNA that can be found in the catalogue. Also the catalogue has links to material at other archives
• FreeReg & FreeCen – both volunteer sites and therefore not complete, variable amounts of data and continually being updated. FreeReg is for Parish Records and FreeCen is Census
• National Archives of Australia – This is an excellent site and whilst some records are available to be digitised upon payment of a fee, if others have already paid that fee the digitised record is available to view and download
• FamilySearch
• Trove – a fantastic resource of Australian newspaper material
• Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC)
• FindAGrave – a volunteer project continually being updated
• Collection at Library of Virginia
• West Virginia records online
• Reclaim the Records
• Antenati (Ancestors for Personal Data Research) – a total gem for Italian genealogical records
• Newfoundland Grand Banks
• British Home Children Database Database up as far as IG and work is continuing
• Modern Newspaper Index

We talk more about Collecting data in the in the Pharos Introduction to One-Name Studies course. Meanwhile, I’ll be back tomorrow talking about what to do with the data once you have collected it.