When I first joined the Guild of One-Name Studies back in 2002 I immediately registered my Orlando One-Name Study. As time passed the Guild began building up a set of indexes for the use of Guild members and I began to contribute. Other members contributed material from their own studies, marriage challenges and their own family history.

Fast forward to 2016 and the world of genealogy had changed. Now there were significant amounts of records online, not just with the Guild but also with the commercial based companies. Having registered the surname Butcher in 2016 I trawled the indexes held by the Guild to see if I could make additions to the Butcher marriages, the focus being that other members had likely submitted requests for their own study to the members who had volunteered to work on a marriage challenge. As there are more than 37,000 Butcher marriages in FreeBMD and that only includes dates up to 1983 it made sense that some of those requests from other members had spouses whose surname was Butcher. That meant that I could use the indexes to expand my England and Wales core data set, which was Butcher.

The Guild indexes are one of my favourite member benefits and they really advocate the ethos of members helping members.

There are two indexes that are available to non-members, the first, an newspaper obituary index was donated by myself in memory of my late Mum and the other is a new index, Marriages of the World and already that over 100,000 entries contained therein. Currently I have not added many marriages from my own study and that is something that I plan to do over the course of the next year. You can access those indexes HERE.