Guild of one-name Studies

One of the many benefits of belonging to the Guild of one-name Studies or GOONs the popular acronym for our research society is the Marriage Challenges which are carried out by members in the UK. One of them or a group will take a Registration District like Crediton, Eton or many many others over time and collect all the marriages for your one-name study providing that you send them an excel sheet with all the desired marriages listed on it. Over time I have received over 100 of the full certificate back and at 9 pounds 50 pence each that is a substantial savings as I do not actually need or want the original for most of the people in my one-name study (I am not necessarily related to all the people especially in my Blake study). I have spent my day putting together my excel charts for several of these Marriage Challenges as the Blake study can have as few as none and so far as many as 70 in one single request. I have now extracted 25,000 of the 30,000 Blake marriages from Free BMD but I am only slowly getting the spouse name entered in. For some areas I have a lot of information but for others not as much. I am just starting to get a feel for the spread of the various Blake lines. Indeed from our yDNA study for the Blake group, there are at a minimum eight founders and they arise in Ireland (likely two different lines), in Hampshire, in Wiltshire, in Somerset, in Devon and continue in Norfolk, Suffolk, London, and the home counties and then north into Yorkshire and I have only just started to build this information.

One of my co-workers has developed over the years a number of family trees on the blake webpage that he has created:

http://blakeheritage.synthasite.com/blake-family-dna-project.php

I am still working on linkages but have concentrated on the 1800s and 1700s but will gradually move back in time. For Hampshire I have linkages back into the 1500s.

I shall continue working on the Marriage Challenges tomorrow in order to submit them in a timely fashion for the researcher to organize. I like to try to check and see if I can figure out at least which parish the marriage is from since the Registration District can include quite a few parishes.

One of my projects this fall is to create the Cardinal Points for Andover Registration District from the fiche that I have (although I have a lot of fiche the number that I have is only about 25% of the entire Registration District). But several other members of the Guild do hold some of these parishes and once I have mine ready I will let them know via our excellent Forum that I am ready to submit my cardinal points if they are able to submit theirs as well.