Espley One Name Study – Update #3

The main reason for very few blog posts during December was because I spent most of my spare time collecting data for my Espley One Name Study.  I am really pleased with the progress since my last update.

I have now finished transcribing all the England and Wales GRO birth, marriage and death records from 1837 to 2005.  I have also transcribed all the IGI information for the Espley name.  All this data is in three A4 books (still plenty of room in the third one).  This wasn’t without its difficulties as I’m sure you can imagine – duplicated entries in the Ancestry index, duplicated entries in the GRO index, some barely readable handwriting in the early GRO records and lots of repetition in the IGI records.

I haven’t yet started on the UK census records – and to be honest I have been putting that off because it’s not quite as easy.  My goal is to make a start on this within the next month.

Over the holidays I set up a spreadsheet to record all the GRO births and I finished typing all the birth information from my index books about two hours ago.  I have now created a second spreadsheet for the GRO marriages and made a start typing the information – I am now having a break.

I joined the Guild of One Name Studies and my new member pack arrived today.  So I have got lots of information to read including the latest quarterly Journal.  This is going to keep me occupied and interested for a while.

I haven’t registered the Espley name with the Guild yet because I am still undecided about the variant names to include.

I also joined the Espley group on Facebook and told members about my project.  I invited them to get in touch with information and photographs etc.

The other thing we’ve started to do is to gather information about the origins of the name and search for locations that have Espley in the name.

I suspect that the only progress I make during the next month will be to get as much of the remaining data as possible typed on spreadsheets.

Finally on the techie side of things I also registered a website domain name in case we want to publish all the results and information on our own website.

I know that Jayne is really keen to try and build as many pedigree trees as possible once we have all the information stored in spreadsheets.  This isn’t a requirement of a One Name Study but I think it will be an interesting project all the same.  However this is a long term goal but one I am looking forward to starting – sometime.