Months of planning and family history month is here tomorrow!

• Auckland Libraries family history eResources;
• Beginners guide to Ancestry;
• Beginners guide to FindMyPast; 
• Beginning your family history;
• Brick walls: tips and tricks to help solve your family history puzzle; 
• British Newspaper Archive; 
• Captives of the Kaiser: Researching Prisoners of War during the First World War;
• Doing family history: a journey to Matakana; 
• Family history roadshow; 
• Hospital records; 
• Military: The use of the official histories; 
• Newspapers and magazines for family history; 
• Pacific Island resources;
• Passenger lists and immigration; 
• Poor law; 
• Probate and wills; 
• Question and answer sessions; 
• Researching First World War records; 
• Researching your Irish ancestry; 
• Searching for your family on the internet; 
• Whakapapa storytime; 
• Whakapapa for adults; 
• Whakapapa for rangatahi (children)
  
  

  

Six steps to beginning your own One-Name Study 

by Anne Brady, guest blogger 


A One-Name Study is a project researching all occurrences of a surname (and its variants), as opposed to a particular pedigree or a particular descendancy. 

The object is to discover things about the actual surname and the people who have held it.

Step One Is it already being done?

Check http://www.one-name.org/ or Google your surname

Step Two Find out more about the name

• How big a study will it be?
  Estimate by using the totals from the 1881 English census:
  - 1-30 Tiny (T)
  - 30-300 Small (S)
  - 300-3000 Medium (M)
  - 3000-30,000 Large (L)
  - 30,000-300,000 (XXL)

Multiplying the number in this census by 10 will give a very approximate count of the total (English) BDMs 1837-2006.

• How common is the name? Look at the ranking of your surname on
  http://surnames.behindthename.com/top/ or
  http://www.taliesin-arlein.net/names/search.php

• How widespread is the name?
  www.nationaltrustnames.org.uk
  www.publicprofiler.org/worldnames
  www.irishtimes.com/ancestor/surname/

• Variants and Deviants
  A VARIANT is an alternate spelling used by individuals themselves, or is one used consistently in official documents.
  DEVIANTS are typos, misreadings of handwriting and any other spelling that is not a true variant, it occurs only randomly.
  
  How many variants and deviants are there? Check the IGI (International Genealogical Index) for a good overview, but remember that you will continue to find more.

Step Three Make some decisions

How will you store and record your research? This will be influenced by the size of your study – from Tiny up to XXL

• Family History program?
• Spreadsheets – Excel, Access (e.g. Custodian)?
• All info on one spreadsheet, or broken down by e.g. type of record, country?
• How will you cope with different spellings?
• How far down the line will you take females who marry out of the name?
• Paperwork or scans
• Filing system?
• Odd bits of information?

Step Four Setting up and getting organised

• Make a list of known variants/deviants. Keep a printout of your list with you at all times, and amend it whenever you find more possibilities
• Once you have a basic list, work out how few online searches you can manage with careful use of wildcards (BL*X*G, BL*C*G etc) and record them
• Set up a new family file in your family history program
• Copy across any data you currently have on that name
• Create whatever spreadsheets you have decided to use. Remember to input from large to small, eg YYYYMMDD, or Country/County/Parish to make sorting and searching easier.

Fields I use on my log: Date searched / Repository / Category / Search Type / Website / Record Title / URL/Catalogue Ref / Country/County / Years searched / Names checked / Result / Notes

• Set up files and folders, both hard-copy and on your PC. Mine are organised by place in descending size order, then by type of record and/or repository. (E.g. UK-ENG-KENT- Cemeteries, Census, Certificates, Directories, Houses, Newspapers, Probate, etc.) Or look at the Family Roots organiser system at http://www.123genealogy.com/organizer/
• Draw up a table of the total census records across all available websites for your name, as not all will be found in one place thanks to the huge variety of transcribing errors. You may find a separate table for each main variant is useful.

Census search results for the name Beachcroft across the major genealogy websites - demonstrates the variation of results you will find across them all Copyright Helen Osborn, www.Pharostutors.com, used with permission

• If you don’t already have a good backup system in place, set one up NOW
• Create a list of the order you plan to search the records in
• Label a folder with ‘To Do’ and keep a separate sheet for each Research Repository, or keep a list in a Word document folder

Step Five - Join the Guild of One Name Studies at www.one-name.org (in order to save lots of money).

Discounts on subscriptions / other offers for different sites:

• Findmypast – 10%
• Lost Cousins – 20%
• The Genealogist (Diamond Subscription) - GBP40 off
• Various other short-term offers are also made
• Use GOONS Marriage, Probate and Scottish indexes; the Wiki; join the Forum and/or the Bulletin Board; get a mentor
• (Use www.marriage-locator.co.uk, a free, public-access website to find the church for many marriages)

Do a Pharos course online about Beginning One Name Studies

Maximise your use of Family Search. If you aren’t sure how to get the best out of it, go to the ‘Learn’ tab and watch some of their videos

In Freebmd download records, and set up saved searches

Trawl Facebook, Youtube and Ebay, look through Gutenberg and Google free books
www.gutenberg.org , www.books.google.com
 
Use other Google products such as alerts, blogs, images, documents & news at http://www.google.com/intl/en/about/products/
 
Remember other search engines such as Mocavo at www.mocavo.com
 
Use www.genuki.org.uk/ to find lots of websites specific to your county and parish. 


And of course never forget Cyndis List . . .

Search Rootsweb message boards and lists at www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/
Browse Wikitree www.wikitree.com
Use free webinars and blogs to learn how to research new areas, gather lots of tips and hear of new websites and programs to try, e.g.

• Genealogy webinar calendar http://blog.geneawebinars.com/p/welcome.html
• Legacy Webinars www.legacy.com
• Youtube how-to videos such as the ‘Twenty with Tessa’ series, which includes lessons on Excel, Freebmd, Legacy Family Tree program and One-Name Studies, amongst others

Make full use of the Auckland Libraries & New Zealand Society of Genealogists (NZSG) resources - What about the many free sites that are available at one or both places - have you tried

• Ancestry
• Find My Past
• The Genealogist
• British (and Irish) Origins
• Family Relatives
• Documents Online (now called Discovery)
• British Newspapers Archive
• Gale Newspapers (use from home)

Have you looked at the bookshelves, the fiche or CD drawers? Have you used the library catalogue to find what there is in any area? Set up Google alerts for your names and areas of interest.

Join Lost Cousins and add the families you find on the specified census pages as ‘One Name Study’ relationships.

Use pay-per-view / subscription sites which allow use of their indexes for free. Sign up for their newsletters so that you know when they are having free weekends for some of their datasets.


Step Six

Begin


About Anne Brady
Anne is the New Zealand representative for the Guild of One-Name Studies (GOONS and a member of the New Zealand Society of Genealogists NZSG).

Anne spoke about One-Name Studies to our audience at Central Library for our family history lunchtime series talks, that Auckland Libraries holds here fortnightly on Wednesdays between February and November. 

She very kindly permitted us to post her informative handout notes here on the Kintalk blog.

Happy hunting
Seonaid

Found a NZ doctor lurking in the family tree? There are a couple of very useful research sources that you should know about.

The Central Auckland Research Centre in Auckland Central Library holds a biographical dictionary by Rex Earl Wright-St Clair: Medical practitioners in New Zealand, from 1840 to 1930.  As the quote from the work's preface states: "In this work are listed alphabetically all medical practitioners known to have been in New Zealand between 1 January 1840 and 31 December 1930, whether registered here or not, providing at least one forename is known".

Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries AWNS--19080806-16-4

Entries vary in size but typically contain details of education, career and death. In many cases they refer to an obituary in a medical journal.

Which leads us to the second source: the New Zealand Medical Association runs a helpful website offering the NZ Medical Journal online.

It includes an index of obituaries appearing in the NZ Medical Journal 1887-2013 and archived issues of the journal itself from 1999. For an obituary earlier than 1999, the website gives contact details for the NZ Medical Association and states that one-off requests are supplied without charge.

Janelle