Created by Julie Goucher, 2018, using wordclouds.com

One of the questions that is asked, of students on the Introduction to One-Name Studies course is about Organisation. The way we keep our study may differ from that of our own family history research.

As I responded to a question from a student, I simply commented that it was important to look at the aims of your study. What followed, was that my fingers travelled across the keyboard at a fairly rapid rate and before I knew where I was I had written a very lengthy post. I then cut and pasted that into a document. Since then I have realigned and updated the post, using questions to confirm clarity and then published it in the Journal of One-Name Studies.

How we organise our material will depend on what our aims are for our studies. Are you simply wanting to:

• Collect instances of the surname
• Reconstruct families
• Do you going to want a website to share and preserve your material?

This is not a case of collect or reconstruct, as a number of members, me included do both. The key thing is, if a website is on your horizon, but you have elected to keep your material on index cards then you are going to have to do a whole lot of work and retyping to turn the contents of the index cards into a means used to create a website.

There is nothing wrong with the index card approach, and I use them, but they are not my only means.  I did a review of my aims and methods a five years ago and decided that I was going to computerise my entire research, digitise 25 years of papers and insert the scrappy bits of paper drawn trees into my software programme and ensure that I had the evidences to support the tree.

I also knew I wanted to use TNG (The Next Generation) software and opted to sign up for the Members Website Project, which is a members benefit for Guild of One-Name Studies members, and enables me to use a website on the Guild’s server AND to preserve my work, whilst still allowing me to update and continue working on my study. I get to the website and TNG from my computerised study by means of a GEDCOM and the ability to add what is referred to a “media” which is images, documents and a number of other elements.

My GEDCOM is not perfect because I have 25 years of work in the filing cabinet and numerous computer files – it remains as a work in progress, as I ensure that I have source citations and so forth all appropriately identified. My aim is that I am going to share how I made the jump from paper to my database.

So, what are your aims for your One-Name Study, where do you want your study to be?

For those interested in joining the Introduction to One-Name Studies course, please visit HERE – if you are quick you can use the discount code for the Black Friday event