First Steps

It seemed quite a big thing at the time; twenty years ago when I collected together my father's version of the family tree. It included his five siblings and my mother's five. It missed half-brothers from his father's first marriage but I knew nothing about that at the time.

In 1997-1998 the internet was in it's infancy so  few genealogical resources online compared with the youthful internet of today. The speed at which the resource has grown has for my generation hit us at the pace of a bullet train. Some have dodged it others have been blown aside. I'm lucky since I started my digital days in 1976 for commercial reasons and have continued to embrace it ever since. Some technical stuff but by and large I am just a very experienced user who sees it as a window on the world. And a means of doing and finding things that would either be impossible or just take too long to achieve.

In those early years I even resorted to sending letters by post with stamps. 

Having collected my father's stuff together. Mainly just living relatives from him so the next step was to pursue the search for my ancestors. My surname, Turner, is amongst the most common.  My knowledge of how things worked at that time was very flaky so decided to look for my Grandmother's maiden name. There were books around. A book about Bishop's Stortford which had a note to my grandmother as Beatrice Boncey. 

It struck me that Boncey was not a common name and I might find out more by looking through the telephone directory. This was then available online so I searched for the name found addresses and typed letters to a couple of dozen of them. I still have the letters I wrote and better still the replies. They were quite numerous and yielded some family history that my new found cousins had already discovered. 

And this helped enormously

The Guild of One-Name Studies approaches genealogical research in an alternative way to the standard method of following ancestral or descendant lines. Researchers record all occurrences of a name and record every detail. A database is built and then the data is organised into family groups where the evidence to validate the collection.

There is an obligation on members of the guild to share their knowledge and to incorporate information from people with information relating to their target name.