It's good to be back...

 Welcome to my latest blog post! It certainly has been a little while since the last one, but life has conspired against me being able to write recently. Life has been extremely busy, what with client work, tutoring work with the University of Strathclyde and I have also moved house! So all in all, a lot has been going on in the last few months.

However, I do now have some time to share my thoughts with you all again and I am very excited to do so! So what have I been up to otherwise? Well I am continuing research on my One Name Study. I read an email from the Guild of One Name Studies recently and liked how the author had described their ONS as a marathon and not a sprint. That certainly applies to mine too. After having put together a fairly complete database for Somerset Rowsell births last year (see my previous post on the subject), I have been extending that to Rowsell births for the rest of the country. To begin with, I did think about doing that after I had completed databases for Somerset marriages and deaths too, but I was on a roll and decided to keep with the births for the moment! It is going slowly but steadily, as there is quite a lot of data to deal with, but hopefully that will be complete soon. Then of course, I have to think about how to share the information with you all. GOONS does have guidance on that, so that is something else I will explore in the upcoming months.

I have also been delving further into the research I undertook for my MSc Dissertation and have been ploughing on with trying to transcribe and translate Medieval Inquisitions Post Mortem, specifically for Somerset women. Women can be an under researched group of individuals at times and the IPMs themselves certainly need a great deal of further research, as so many have not even been transcribed (let alone translated). This sadly makes them pretty inaccessible for the researcher in general, so I hope to be able to contribute (eventually!) to rectifying that situation. Sometimes you just need a catalyst to get you back into researching or thinking about a particular area again, and mine had to have been the talk I recently presented for the Foundation for Medieval Genealogy. This was based on the IPM work I have finished to date and was a great start to doing in person talks again! I am due to give the same subject to the Frome Family History Group in March next year, which I am very excited about. I met the group when I attended the Frome Family History Day back in May this year.

A great day was had by all at the Frome Family History Show back in May. Image © 2022 Shersca Genealogy.

Some of you may remember my previous blog posts regarding one Gouly de Chaville (click here and here for a link to these posts) and the legacy of his surname. At the time of writing, there was so much more that I could have said, so I hope to write some more about him. I hope to do some more research on his grandchildren and great-grandchildren too, as there is some exciting research to be done in Australian and South African sources. One day, perhaps this might even lead to another One Name Study, but one step at a time! It will have to go in the queue behind my other idea for an ONS: Incledon. That surname is another story altogether, but it is a side of my own family that has presented quite the brick wall, so I have been wondering if an ONS approach might help.

There are of course many other things that I might be writing about as the year goes on (forgive me but I think in Academic years rather than calendar years at the moment!), but everyone has to start somewhere, especially after such a break as I have had. The other problem is that there are so many ideas to put down, that finding the time to explore them all is difficult. So in the vein of taking it step by step and starting somewhere, I will probably concentrate on the main three above. Due to time constraints, I won’t be able to post quite as much as I have in previous years, but do look out for my posts on the first week of the month.

I look forward to sharing what I have found with you all again, and remember that you can find me on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, blogger.com, Tumblr and the blog section of my website.