Wedding Wednesday - Tillin/Tillen/Tilling/Till?n England and Wales Marriages

One of the benefits of using Custodian as my records database is that I can quickly analyse the data and start to produce statistics about my Tillin One Name Study.

So I have started with Marriages.

If I filter my name index I find that there are 5,307 marriage index records in my database. But this doesn't mean there are 5,307 marriages as each name referenced counts as a separate record. So my next filter is by surname to include those with surnames starting with TILL. This reduces the number to 3,160 names. I then removed any references where the person with the surname starting with TILL was the spouse and not the primary Tillin reference. Finally, I got to 3,061 records from the indexes between 1837 and 2005 (according to Ancestry.co.uk) in England and Wales.

The split by surname was as follows

TILLING - 2679

TILLIN - 238

TILLEN - 136

TILLON - 4

TILLYN - 2

TILLAN - 2

which is what I would have expected as TILLING is a much more common surname.

To further analyse the data I exported it to an Excel spreadsheet and used a pivot table for easy analysis.

By decade, it looks like the most popular decade for marriages was the 1960s.

If I look at the TILLIN name itself the top 5 registration districts are Camberwell, Reading, Windsor, Kettering and Bradfield.  This is sort of what I would expect but the fact that Kettering has made the top 5 places was a bit of a surprise although all of these records were from 1936 onwards.

If I look at TILLING the top 5 registration districts are Bristol, Cheltenham, Swindon, Stroud and Warrington. This time Warrington is the surprise as I haven't had very many records from the North of England so that is a new area to look at.

The top 5 TILLEN registration districts were Newbury, Reading, Bradfield, Wokingham and Brentfield.

At the moment I'm not sure what this tells me but I find the geographical spread of the surnames quite interesting and maybe I need to look at some sort of mapping analysis.

Tech Tuesday - How I collect and analyse data for my One Name Study

I'm always interested in how people actually "do" their One Name Study on a practical level. My study is still in it's infancy so I've had quite a haphazard approach.

Recently I sat down and decided on a more structured plan of attack.

I knew that I wanted to collect some data, store the data somewhere and then start to group the individuals named in the data into families. Ultimately the goal would be to work out if everyone is related but that's a long way in the future.

As my first mission I decided that I wanted to collect all references to TILL?N and TILLING from the England Censuses 1841-1911 and the England and Wales Births, Marriages and Deaths Indices. I used Ancestry as the source as this is the website that I currently have a subscription to - ultimately I think I'd like to cross-reference with other sources (e.g. FindMyPast) to try and negate any transcribing errors.

To collect my data I used Outwit Hub. This scrapes the data from the internet and turns it into a csv or excel file.

I uploaded the output files into Custodian, which is database software written specifically for family history. This generates a Name Index where the references are consolidated allowing me to see all links to a particular name.

I already have some information in Family Historian so I've begun the process of going through each TILL?N and TILLING individual and allocating a personal and family reference to each record I now hold in Custodian. This is slow going but it's already shown me where I've missed people and is generating a new research list.

Once I've gone through the individuals I've already got in Family Historian I'll start to try and group the other individuals recorded in Custodian.

Already I've spotted where I've got unallocated records.

The picture above shows the name index filtered for everyone in my records with a forename starting Charles and the surname recorded as Tillin. From here i can start to group records together and spot records I've not allocated to people.

I'm looking forward to starting to fill in some gaps even though this will be a long process.

How do you conduct your One Name Study? Any tips? Do you use any of these programs?