4-6 April Outings The 37th Guild Conference Posted 29 January 2016 by Tracy CareWe have finally managed to arrange outings for the days between our conference and Who Do You Think You Are? Live and we hope that many of you will want to take the opportunity to join with fellow one-namers on these days. Please be aware that we have to provide these venues with final numbers by 1st March so book early using the links in the accompanying e.mail. If you have any problems booking in this way please contact conference@guild-dev.org Please add all trips that you wish to attend before completing checkout. Monday 4 April Guided Bus Tour of Historic Birmingham A 1½ hour guided open-top bus tour of the historic sites of Birmingham. This will leave from the conference venue. Either stop off in the city centre and make your own way home afterwards or return on the bus. £10 per person. Please note that if we do not get sufficient interest in this trip we shall have to cancel. As we will be proceeding with this trip on the basis of bookings received, we regret that those who book will have to pay and it will not be possible to cancel. Tuesday 5 April The Black Country Museum The Black Country Museum, Tipton Road, Dudley DY1 4SQ (www.bclm.co.uk) is one of the finest and largest open-air museums in the United Kingdom, set in twenty six acres. They have recreated a Black Country community at the height of its industrial past, complete with residents and trams to ride. There are things being made and stories to hear. The Museum is about 25 miles from the conference venue. We will be leaving the NEC Hilton in private cars at 9.50am and will arrange car sharing during the conference, or alternatively meet us at the Museum at 10.45am. £12 adults £10 senior citizens Wednesday 6 April Sarehole Mill Sarehole Mill is a 250 year old working watermill famous for its association with the author J R R Tolkien (http://www.birminghammuseums.org.uk/sarehole) The Mill is situated at Cole Bank Road, Birmingham B13 0BD nine miles from the conference venue. Cole Bank Road (B4146) is off the Stratford Road (A34). We shall be leaving the NEC Hilton in private cars at 11.30am and will arrange car sharing during the conference; or alternatively meet us at the Museum at 11.50am. £7 per person. Numbers for this outing are restricted, please book early.
Website downtime warning and 2016 conference link Posted 24 January 2016 by Paul HowesI’ve been advised by our IT team that our website will be unavailable for approximately two hours between 6am GMT and 8am on Tuesday, 26th January. Our web-hosting company, Krystal, will be performing an upgrade to server hardware. The outage includes the main Guild site at guild-dev.org including those parts of the site accessed through the Members Room, the WW1 site at ww1.guild-dev.org and our email system. Emails sent during this time will be placed in a queue for later delivery. If there’s any variation in the actual experience beyond these expectations, stay tuned to Facebook and our Rootsweb mailing list for updates. 2016 Conference While writing, I just want to note that a link in my newsletter to the conference web page didn’t work properly. If you’d like to come to our conference in Birmingham, you can book a place using the form linked from this page: https://guild-dev.org/the-37th-guild-conference-agm-2016/. For any non-member reading this on our Facebook page, please note that you are welcome too! Paul
The Guild’s Latest Membership Landmark Posted 5 January 2016 by Clifford KemballThe Guild of One-Name Studies has reached another membership milestone. In 2015 the Guild of One-Name Studies broke all its previous memberships records by recruiting some 418 new members with a further 15 previous Guild members re-joining the Guild during the year. A total of 433 new members. This milestone follows a very successful year for the Guild of One-Name Studies in 2015 when the Guild achieved its highest membership ever – some 2,847 members. Since the 1st January 2015 some 418 members joined the Guild of One-Name Studies, 233 were from the UK, 90 from the US, 14 from New Zealand, 43 from Australia, 16 from Canada and 9 from the Republic of Ireland. The remainder were from various other countries. 44% of the new members were from non-UK regions, which is a valuable step towards increased worldwide membership for the Guild. There were also 15 returning members: 9 from the UK, 3 from the US, 1 from Australia and 2 from Canada. The Guild now has 2,847 members spread across the world, studying over 8,700 individual surnames.The continued increase in the Guild’s membership every year since the Guild was founded in 1979 (an achievement not many Family History organisations have managed) is a testament to the popularity of the Guild and the benefits it offers to its members – as the following table shows: New members per month: Year Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Total Average 2015 27 22 44 95 29 29 28 24 37 29 22 32 418 34.8 2014 34 64 14 15 10 21 11 15 21 21 27 30 283 23.6 2013 17 53 25 24 12 9 19 18 27 20 15 6 245 20.4 Details of all the Guild facilities can be found at: http:\\www.guild-dev.org/about-the-guild/membership-benefits where you can find out: more about undertaking a One-Name Study the benefits of joining the Guild of One-Name Studies, and the assistance members of the Guild can provide to anyone researching their family history on any of the 8,700-plus names currently being researched. Cliff Kemball, the Guild’s Publicity Officer, said today: This is yet another significant milestone for the Guild of One-Name Studies and is a testament to the continued development of the Guild internationally and the benefits membership provides. We hope that this trend continues into 2016 and beyond and reaffirms the Guild as the world’s leading organisation for One-Name Studies.”
A sainted study Posted 30 November 2015 by Paul HowesHow many One-Name Studies can claim a real saint as part of their number? There are the Saint, St. John and St. Paul One-Name Studies, but they are not what I mean. It’s 30th November, St Andrew’s Day, the patron saint of Scotland. But St Andrew is not whereof we speak either. Cuthbert Mayne in front of the gallows and Launceston Castle On this day in 1577, in Launceston, Cornwall a man named Cuthbert Mayne was hanged to within an inch of his life and then disemboweled, beheaded and quartered, each piece of him then being displayed in a different part of the county as a warning to others. He died for his beliefs, the first seminary priest ever to be martyred for his faith in England. Beatified in 1898, he was created a saint in 1970 by Pope Paul VI. How did all of this come about? The son of a poor shepherd, Cuthbert Mayne grew up in Shirwell, in the North-western corner of Devon. His uncle was a Rector in the established church, then going through enormous upheaval with the transition of monarchs from Mary Tudor to her sister Elizabeth I, and the consequent massive switch in the national practice of religion from catholic to protestant. Elizabeth was excommunicated by the pope in 1567 after which it became very dangerous to be a catholic in England. But South-Western England had many “hold-outs” for the old ways, for many years. The Rector sponsored young Cuthbert to go to Barnstaple Grammar School, after which he became a priest in a local church at the age of seventeen! He then went to Oxford and gained a degree and a “living” as the chaplain of St John’s College. In those troubled times, that had necessitated him to sign an oath of loyalty to the Queen as head of the church. However, his conscience troubled him and within three years he found himself at a seminary in Douai, France, where he was ordained again in a different faith. In March 1576 he returned to Cornwall and lived with a wealthy local catholic family, ostensibly as their steward but in practice their priest. He and his patron were arrested by the local Sheriff and imprisoned for five months and at the local Assizes he was condemned to die, his crime being refusing to recant his faith and recognize Elizabeth as the head of the church. Actually, this is just a summary, taken from a chapter of a book, Soldiers, Saints and Scallywags, authored by Guild member David Gore about some of the people in his One-Name Study into the Mayne name. He writes much better than me and I do recommend that you read the original here: David Gore eBook. By the way, while reading that chapter I happened to notice reference to three other study names too: Body, Carey and Edgecombe, and I suspect there are references to others in the extensive Index Nominorum. David tells us that he has been a member of the Guild for almost thirty years and has received much good advice from other members along the way, most notably from our Front Desk and DNA Advisor. Do you have a Mayne man or woman in your study? If so, you can click here to send David a note or on the other names above to contact the respective study owners. With two English schools named after him, it seems both ironic and fitting that Cuthbert’s name should have lived on longer than his persecutors. Every time I read a story such as this I give thanks that I grew up in more enlightened times and in a more enlightened place. This is the third in an occasional series. If you are a Guild member reading this, does your study have a special day for remembering your name, like 5th November or Trafalgar Day? Would you like us to publicize your study on that day? If so, send us an email by clicking this link.