Guild of One-Name Studies
One-name studies, Genealogy
This study is no longer registered with the Guild, but this profile page has been retained at the member's request. Please note that neither officers nor members of the Guild are able to answer any questions about this study.
My paternal grandmother used to remark 'If you meet anyone called Doogood, they will be a relative'. Yeah, right.
When I began to study my Family History a few years ago, I made the usual searches and was surprised to find the surname cropped up only infrequently in sources like FreeBMD, the IGI or the 1881 census for England and Wales.
One of my sons became intrigued and decided to search the entire GRO Index in microfiche for the name, and from this and other sources we built up a picture - all the fragments began to link up and in the end we discovered that, apart from a handful of people that couldn't be fitted in, my grandmother had been right all along - the Doogoods in England and Wales (and, we later found, Australia) were all descended from John Doogood and his wife Mary Faulks, who were married in Leigh, Worcestershire, in 1770.
I am now reasonably confident that I have identified all the Doogood descendants of John and Mary, and learned some of the history of quite a few of them. Alas, the name has become extinct in England, so far as I can discover, but is still thriving in Australia.
The name was a bit more common pre-1770, with isolated groups cropping up here and there, and I do know that there were Doogoods overseas (in the West Indies for example). However, it has proved very difficult to build up any kind of family structure. Nor can I discover much from other records available to me. Perhaps a promising field for a more direct descendant, who could use DNA in his research?
The Doogoods seem to have been quite good as escaping what would now be called media attention. The only real claimant to fame is Henry Doogood, who was 'the most celebrated of Wren's plasterers' and decorated a number of buildings around 1690.
Nineteenth and twentieth century Doogoods followed quite a range of professions! They include a farmer, an excise officer, a railway porter, a couple of tailors, an attorney, a builder, a painter and decorator, an innkeeper, a jeweller, a coal miner, a Charlie Chaplain impersonator and a television cameraman. And they do crop up here and there in the Times Digital Archive, the London Gazette, etc.