Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Guild of One-Name Studies (GOONS) Database Is Now Available at FamilySearch.org

I received this press release from FamilySearch this morning:

============================================

Guild of One-Name Studies Is Now Available at FamilySearch.org
The online resource helps people trace the possible origins and variations of their last name.

LONDON, UK and SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH (September 6, 2016)—The Guild of One-Name Studies, a charitable organization that promotes facts about given surnames, and FamilySearch International, a nonprofit and the largest genealogy organization in the world, announced today The Guild’s collections will now be searchable at FamilySearch.org.  The partnership gives Guild members another source for preserving their great work while also allowing more researchers across the globe to benefit from exploring the variant spellings of their personal surnames and possibly connect with others with the same last name throughout the world. 

The study of one’s last name (one-name or surname) researches all known occurrences of that particular surname in all identifiable resources worldwide, as opposed to the ancestors or descendants of a person. Such richly compiled studies can assist a family history researcher see the geographical distribution of surnames in their tree over centuries which can help in reconstructing family lines bearing variants of those names. A common hope of customers that use surname studies is to identify the actual geographic locale of origin of a family surname. This could very well happen for unique surnames, but for common surnames that reflect an occupation (like “Farmer” or “Fisher”) or a patronymic-type surname (Johnson or Williamson), there may not be a single place of origin.
Cliff Kemball, Guild Publicity Manager said “The partnership with FamilySearch give Guild members another method of preserving their One-Name Study data.  Their data is fully preserved for the long term, while still remaining within the control of the Guild member, who may update, replace or delete it as their work develops.”

The Guild was founded in 1979, and has over 2,980 members, studying over 8,935 individual surnames.  The Guild of One-Name Studies website launched April 1, 2016, and is continually expanding its list of surnames. The Guild expects the volume of data submitted by Guild members to significantly increase now that they can make their research contributions online. And teaming up with FamilySearch.org will ensure more people are making interesting discoveries about their surnames.

David Rencher, the Chief Genealogy Office for FamilySearch, said, “The rigorous standards and guidelines required by the Guild of One Name Studies for members of the guild make this the highest quality data available for these surnames. Those who administer and oversee the collection of this data have spent decades collecting all instances of the surnames from a wide variety of records. Since many of these sources are yet to be made available on the Internet, this new set of records on FamilySearch is a rich new source of information.”

To see if your surname has been researched by The Guild community, go to FamilySearch.org, Search, Genealogies, enter your last name, and search Guild of One-name Studies.
More information about the Guild can be found at one-name.org where researchers can also register their own surnames.

###
About The Guild of One-Name Studies
The Guild of One-Name Studies is the world's leading organisation for one-name studies. A one-name study is a project researching facts about a surname and all the people who have held it, as opposed to a particular pedigree (the ancestors of one person) or descendancy (the descendants of one person or couple). The Guild is a charitable organisation dedicated to promoting the public understanding of one-name studies and the preservation and accessibility of the resultant information. Founded in 1979, the Guild now has over 2,980 members spread across the world, studying over 8,935 individual surnames.

=============================================

The directions are in the second to last paragraph above:

*  Go to FamilySearch.org
*  Click on Search
*  Click on Genealogies
*  Put a surname in the search field
*  Select Guild-of-One-name Studies on the left margin

Let's do it:

1)  I went to https://familysearch.org, clicked on "Search," then on "Genealogies" and saw:


2)  I entered "seaver" in the "Last Name" field on the screen above, and clicked on "Search" (two screens shown below):


There were over 101,000 matches in all of the "Genealogies" section (not in the GOON area) for the Seaver surname (not exact). On the left-side of the screen above, under "Collections," I clicked on the check box for "Guild of One-name Studies."

3)  The screen changed to show me 6 matches for "seaver" in the GOONS collection:


4)  I clicked on one of the matches, and the information for that person appeared in the area on the left with a family tree on the remainder of the screen:

5)  I was surprised that there were so few entries for Seaver in this database.  My mindset was that this organization has been around since 1979 and certainly would have many entries for the Seaver surname - perhaps hundreds or thousands.  

Then I thought, "Well, Seaver is an uncommon surname.  What about Smith?"  Well, Smith had just 1,044 matches in it.  "Johnson" has 368 matches.  Brown has 529 matches.  But "Kemp" has 111,713 matches.  Huh?  Apparently, someone with a Kemp database is a member of the GOONS and has submitted a large database.  I searched for my John Kemp born 1723 and ... found he was in the database, but no parents were listed.

UPDATE 7 September 2016:  Debbie Kennett commented:

"The files submitted are inevitably going to reflect the interests of individual Guild members who are researching specific surnames of interest in addition to their own family tree. As neither the surnames Seaver or Smith are registered with the Guild you wouldn't expect to find many submissions from Guild members for these surnames. Also the initiative has only just been announced and only a small number of Guild members have so far uploaded GEDCOM files. We will no doubt expect to see the numbers increase in the months and years to come."

My thanks to Debbie for the clarification.

=============================================

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2016/09/guild-of-one-name-goon-studies-database.html

Copyright (c) 2016, Randall J. Seaver

Please comment on this post on the website by clicking the URL above and then the "Comments" link at the bottom of each post.  Share it on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or Pinterest using the icons below.  Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com.

6 comments:

Ruby Coleman said...

I totally appreciate all of the updates you post. This is definitely great news. Thanks.

Andrew Kemp said...

Hi Randy,

Well you found me :-)

Happy to add to your Kemp family. Please email me to discuss/exchange information.

Kind regards,
Andrew

Debbie Kennett said...

The files submitted are inevitably going to reflect the interests of individual Guild members who are researching specific surnames of interest in addition to their own family tree. As neither the surnames Seaver or Smith are registered with the Guild you wouldn't expect to find many submissions from Guild members for these surnames. Also the initiative has only just been announced and only a small number of Guild members have so far uploaded GEDCOM files. We will no doubt expect to see the numbers increase in the months and years to come.

Randy Seaver said...

Andrew, my Kemp line is listed in http://www.geneamusings.com/2009/12/surname-saturday-kemp.html

Randy Seaver said...

Debbie, I didn't realize that there were very few GEDCOM files. I thought that the GOONS site had them in addition to a registry. My bad.

M. Diane Rogers said...

There will be many more added soon, including my Saggers. This is a very new initiative. Sorry, Randy, so far no Seavers in my databases. But I'll keep an eye out. Yes, I'm a Goon.