Guild Of One Name Studies
Cliff Kemball is our Society’s representative on the Guild of One-Name Studies
The Guild of One-Name Studies archive facility provides a means for Guild members, with a registered name, to archive their one-name study data and make it available, if you wish, to other members of the Guild and also to the public generally. So what developments have been introduced and how useful are they for a one-name society like the International Relf Society?
The Guild of One-Name Studies has developed a number of advanced features that extends the way members of the Guild can use and control the archive facility and expand on the range of data records that can be uploaded and made available to others – including members of our own one-name society.
So what is a One-name Study about?
According to the rules of The Guild, the Aims and Objectives should be:-
- To maintain an association of those interested in the origin, history and development of the various branches of a family – in our case the RELF & Variants families.
- To hold meetings once or twice a year at places of special interest to the families.
- To circulate a regular Newsletter dealing with matters of topical interest and current genealogical and biographical research into the families with news items, letters and articles contributed by Society members.
- To promote the conservation of documents, monuments and other material of special significance to the families.
- To foster the study of the RELF & Variant family history with the intention of sponsoring the publication of definitive research where this is appropriate.
If the International Relf Society is to develop along these lines it will need support from like-minded individuals. There are lots of RELF’s & Variant in the world and at least some of you must be interested in discovering whether or how you are related to the others.
Implementing an initial Relf data archive & Variants
To demonstrate how the Guild’s archive facility could be used, I uploaded a data set of civil marriages in England and Wales 1837 to 1922 of Relf (and other variants) marriages. I added user-defined fields to the standard civil marriage records format and employed the “registered mode” to authorise and monitor data access and searches. The data set has 10,353 records.
As the International Relf Societies’ representative for the Guild of One-Name Studies, my main aim was to enable this data to become available to other members of the International Relf Society and subsequently to members of the public.
The Registration process
The archive provides a self-service facility by which members of the International Relf Society can apply for registration. To register to gain access to the civil marriage records you will need to click on the register button at www.one-name.org/archives/relf.html which will take you to the registration page. The registration page asks for personal details such as name, address, telephone number and e-mail, together with a summary of your interest in the Relf surname.
I would be very grateful if members of the International Relf Society will register to gain access to the Guild archive. It will initially give you access to over 10,000 Relf (and variants) civil marriage records. I however plan to add further records in the coming months and years. Once you have registered and been given access you will be able to log on to the Relf archive using the link above and clicking on “log on” button.
Give it a go and see what you can find.Cliff Kemball
goons@relfsociety.org