Orphaned Studies

An "orphaned" one-name study is one where the registered owner has either died or has for some other reason had to discontinue their study, and where the study material has been lodged with the Guild or with some other organisation such as a Record Office or the Society of Genealogists.

The one-name study material that the Guild holds may be in either physical (paper) form, or it may be digitised and held as part of the Guild's electronic library. In the case of data in paper form, since the Guild itself has no premises of its own and only limited storage facilities for the archiving or accessing of such one-name study data, this can present a storage problem. We are currently reviewing our holding of paper records, and a full listing of our holding will be available in due course.

In the case of digitised data, we are investigating the possibility of putting this data online for access by Guild members. Again, a list of such material will be made available in due course.

The printed Register has for some years included the names of orphaned studies as "librarian studies", with the instruction to anyone interested in these names to contact the Librarian. It should be noted that not all of these studies are in fact held by the Guild; some of them are located at other repositories such as the Society of Genealogists in London.

The list of such studies is shown here.

Guild members or potential Guild members interested in taking over one of these orphaned studies will be asked to put forward a case for doing so, by demonstrating their ability to take on the study and by agreeing to the Guild's requirements for responding to queries from members of the public.