Guild of One-Name Studies
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Guild of One-Name Studies is a UK-based charitable organization founded in 1979 for one-name studies.
Contents |
[edit] History
The Guild was established at an inaugural meeting in September 1979 in England. The decision to call it a guild was partly inspired by the notion that medieval guilds had encouraged professionalism along with mutual aid, as well as by a whimsical desire to create the acronym GOONS, evoking a popular British radio humour show and making a self-mocking comment on the quixotic nature of one-name studies. In later years there were efforts to discourage use of this deprecating acronym, but by this time it was in widespread use and could no longer be suppressed.
As a small organization with annual income of about 80,000 pounds, the Guild has no employed staff. The fact that its members conduct some of the world's most ambitious and sustained family history projects with an international scope has brought it special standing in the genealogy world. Its development has been mostly harmonious, with only occasional friction over policy or spending. It has cooperated closely with the Halsted Trust, created by legacy, which promotes one-name studies.
While one-name studies have mainly been popular in Britain, thanks to that country’s unified and open vital records, the Guild has always officially insisted that every study it recognises should be worldwide in scope, and has sought to cater to non-British studies in its basic methodical advice.
[edit] One-name studies
A one-name study is a project, carried out by a single person, or a group, researching all occurrences of a particular surname and its variants, throughout the world, over all recorded time.
Typically, the researchers will also study the etymology of the surname, and its geographical distribution. Sometimes, especially if the surname is also a place name, they will try to identify a single place of origin of the surname, employing the general principles of regular genealogy.
[edit] Activities
The principal meeting places of the Guild are its Forum, an online mailing list hosted by Rootsweb, and its conferences which are usually held in smaller towns of England. As an organization, its principal role has been to debate and distribute advice on one-name methods. Members have collated a wiki of such advice, but this is not yet publicly available.
To meet the concern of members that one-name compilations are often lost to posterity when researchers die and their papers are destroyed, the Guild Archive, an electronic repository for members' one-name records, was created and guidelines laid down on bequests of digital data to the Guild.
The Guild Marriage Index, a facility to help members find the names of marriage partners and identify from index numbers where post-1837 marriages took place in England and Wales, is likely to become the Guild’s main contribution to the wider field of family history.
[edit] Publications
The Guild’s initial periodical was the Guild of One-Name Studies Newsletter, published quarterly for eight issues from January 1980 to October 1981 on corner-stapled, typescript foolscap sheets under editor Frank Higenbottam.[1]
This was followed by the Guild of One-Name Studies Journal, with binding, also quarterly, from 1982 to the present. Its current editor is Roy Stockdill.
The Register of the Guild, published periodically, is a guide to one-name studies currently being conducted. The Guild also publishes booklets of advice such as Organising a One-Name Gathering.
[edit] Membership
At its foundation, the Guild had about 200 members. At present (2007), it has slightly more than 2,000, whose names are presented in a register published both online and on paper. The register shows that slightly more than 2,000 studies are being conducted involving a total of about 7,500 surname forms. A considerable number of early members have retired or died, and their studies, additional to this number, have therefore ceased.
Some 20 per cent of the membership present their findings through a website. Guild members can also publicize their studies through a so-called profile page created on the Guild’s website. As an indicator of digitized methods, 80 per cent of the members have an e-mail address registered with the Guild.[2]
The addresses of members show the bulk to be living in Britain, but with significant numbers in North America and Australasia.
[edit] External links
[edit] References
- ^ Palgrave, Derek, 'Before the Journal — Looking back to the Guild’s early days and its first Newsletter', Journal of One-Name Studies, October-December 2006.
- ^ Millington, Paul, 'Some Guild Stats', Rootsweb Archive 2006-10-02.
