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?

Thrifty Thursday - Freebmd.org

One of the benefits of being a member of the Guild of One Name Studies is the chance to participate in the Marriage Challenges.

This is when another member volunteers to look up marriages in parish registers for a particular registration district. This is usually in the UK but I have seen some international ones.

Every month I take a look at the list of upcoming challenges to see if there is a registration district where I may have some TILLIN/TILLING/TILLEN mariages. (I have registered TILLING and TILLEN as variants of my name with the Guild.

This week I found out that the one of the new challenges is in a registration district of Mitford so I headed off to my favourite free genealogy resource.

My Thrifty Thursday tip is to use the website FreeBMD.

This website has transcriptions of the Birth, Marriages and Deaths Indices for England and Wales. It was the first website I found when I started looking at my family history and it is an absolutely brilliant free resource. It is all transcribed by volunteers and after having a go at transcribing a few years ago I really appreciate the effort and work that has gone into it.

It's also worth pointing out that the same information is available on Ancestry.co.uk but I'm not sure if you have to have a subscription or not to see it.

Unfortunately, when I searched Mitford Registration District for TILLIN/TILLING/TILLEN marriages nothing came up so I won't be sending any entries for this challenge. Maybe next time...
 

Hello again - update and plans

Hiya,


It has been a while since I blogged but I am finally finding I have a bit more time to think about genealogy and how I would like to share it with you.

We are a busy family now - 3 children under 7!!! - so I have to be more organised with my hobbies but as they are off at school/clubs I actually have time to think about things.

My first attempt at improving my blogging organisation is to use the daily prompts at www.geneabloggers.com. I haven't done any more planning but I'm going to jump right in with one of the Wednesday prompts later on so watch this space!

I have been concentrating on my TILLIN One Name Study more than my own personal genealogy. I use Outwit Hub to scrape data, then Custodian to store the date and Family Historian to link family groups. I'll share my methodology and would be interested in finding out how it compares to other one namers.

Also, I'm interested in finding more UK genealogy blogs - I've been reading the same ones for a long time (and I really like them!) but it would be great to find some new ones.

So, I'll go and get organised for my first "real" post in a while.

See you soon

Jo

TILLINs in the Births Index 1837-1915

I have been making a start on the data for my One Name Study.

I've now transcribed properly all the TILLINs in the birth indices from 1837 to 1915 (transcribed by FreeBMD but accessed via Ancestry.co.uk). I've also transcribed any TILLINGs and TILLENs if they appeared on the same page as I think they are common misspellings or possible derivatives. I will need to come back to this record set at some point to make sure I've transcribed all the people who have a mother with TILLIN as their maiden name.

It's been quite satisfying to realise that I already had records of most of them - maybe from a census - but it feels good to have a proper list.

The next record set I'm going to tackle is the Births Indices for 1916-2005. These will take longer due to the maiden names.

I am adding each record to my Family Historian tree and allocating a Custom ID to each individual so that I can hopefully tie up individuals over time. Do you have a Custom ID method? Where do you keep your records? How do you collect data from Record Sets?

Creating my TILLIN One Name Study web page

As mentioned before I registered the surname TILLIN with the Guild of One Name Studies last Saturday at WDYTYA Live.

Tonight, I set up my profile page and you can see it here.

By setting up the page I realised that I need to approach the analysis from a more analytical point of view. For example, how many TILLIN families/individuals were in the 1841 census compared to the 1901 census? What data do I actually have? What locations in the country do the TILLINs seem to come from?

So, guess what I'm off to do now...

WDYTYA Live 2011

So, after a bit of a break I'm back! Genealogy has taken a bit of a back seat over the last few months with the arrival of my 3rd child. Anyway I managed to get a ticket for Who Do You Think You Are Live at Olympia last weekend and spent a few hours of child free family tree time.

The night before I had taken a good look at the WDYTYA Live website and decided on the stands I wanted to visit. I knew that I had a short time scale as I was due to meet friends for lunch in central London so I wanted to make the most of my time.

I arrived at Olympia on Saturday 26th February at 9.30am and trooped off the underground with everyone else straight into the end of a queue. The queue seemed long but was constantly moving and within 5 minutes I had got through the front door. This was the point where my research came in handy - I immediately headed upstairs to pick up some tickets for a talk at 11am. But, the queue was long and I didn't want to waste any time and I knew from a previous visit that I would be able to stand at the back and listen so I headed off to the military area.

We have a ROBBINS ancestor who was part of the Royal Garrison Artillery in Gibraltar so I chatted to a guy on the Royal Artillery Museum stand. I bought a couple of books to provide a bit of background and a booklet about tracing military ancestors.

As it was still early I spent 5 minutes chatting to a guy on the PRONI stand and we worked out that to continue tracing my GUTHRIE roots there may be some estate management papers in the archives. So maybe one day I'll be able to go to Belfast and investigate that further.

Then it was off to the Guild of One Name Studies. I have been a member for a couple of years but after speaking with Corinne I took the plunge and registered my TILLIN one name study. I will let you know when my profile page is up and running.

Next door was the North of Ireland Family History Society which I joined as an associate member - I'm looking forward to their bi-annual publication and possibly doing a bit of research in Coleraine when I'm over there in August.

After a quick pause for a drink, I stopped at the Berkshire Family History Society where we found some TILLINs on their Marriage and Burial Indices. I didn't buy the CDs but I'm considering it as I know that the bulk of my TILLINs are from this county.

Finally I listened to the talk by D. Josh Taylor on organising. I missed the first 10 minutes but the part that I heard was really useful. I'm hoping to get hold of the handouts from the website at some point as there was quite a lot to take in.

And with that it was time to head off into Central London. I'd had a quick genealogy fix and enjoyed chatting with everyone. I think I'm getting braver and found that actually speaking to people made the WDYTYA experience much more fun. I also have 3 areas to focus my research on for the next few months which will hopefully stop me going off on too many tangents!

Summary Sunday

Hi all!

I've had a reasonable productive week or two since coming back from the holidays.

I've got caught up in the whole GenealogyWise thing. I think it's going to be a useful tool in the future but will take a while to settle down. At the moment there are so many groups that I think will ultimately fall by the wayside while some are active already. I've joined a few and will let you know about about any progress that I made. So far I've answered some queries about Excel, contacted someone who has information about my husband's BOXALL family and read a lot of comment wall posts.

I've become a GOON! I've been thinking about it for a while and took the plunge this week to join the Guild of One Name Studies. I haven't registered a surname yet but have already found the resources available to members useful. I'm trying to tie up as many TILLINs as I can so hopefully I'll pick up tips from the Guild.

Thanks to Ancestry it's been quite easy to pull together all the TILLIN births and marriages now as they've added a full transcription of the indices for births and marriages - hopefully the deaths aren't too far away. So I've been able to add to some of the aunts and uncles with a few more life events.

Another discovery was that my local library membership also gives me access to some useful sites, including the Times archive, for free and from my home over the internet. So far I've not found much on my initial browse but I'm hoping to discover some stories about my ancestors.

I'm hoping to get some more work done this week so hopefully I'll have some discoveries to tell you about.

PS It was also the start of a new series of Who Do You Think You Are this week - Davina McCall has some interesting ancestors!!