Guild of One-Name Studies

One-name studies, Genealogy

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    • 2,135 members
    • 2,052 studies
    • 7,292 surnames

Retained profile for the former
Few One-Name Study

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.

About the study

I never intended to write what is now a book of 247 pages on the Few family of Cambridgeshire. I started researching the family of my great-grandmother, Emily Mary FEW, and it grew from that. I then found A J Gautrey's short paper on the family and expanded it. It has now moved well beyond the Fenlands of Cambridgeshire, and is as up to date as I can make it. It now covers the 14th to the 21st centuries, and continue to grow almost daily.

Variant names

FEU, FUE, FEWE, FFEWE, PHUE, FUES, FFEU, FFEW, FFUE, FEIW, FIEW, PHEW, PHEWE, PHUGH and, most extraordinarily of all, FWE, but these are all due to illiteracy rather than true variants. My interest remains with the basic name FEW.

Name origin

Possibly from Le Fevre, meaning a smith in Norman French.

Historical occurrences of the name

If there are any remarkable holders of this name I have yet to find them, but I live in hope.

Name frequency

The name is the 5895th most common name in England and Wales

Distribution of the name

Cambridgeshire and nearby counties. Hampshire and Wiltshire, with families in London, Essex, Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire and Cheshire all of whom appear to be offshoots of the Wiltshire or Cambridgeshire families. South Africa, Australia, the USA, Canada and the West Indies.

Data

Many of the FEW BMDs from the GRO for England & Wales (since 1837) have been recorded together with information from the England and Wales censuses from 1841 to 1911. The one-name study also included numerous entries from Parish Registers and censuses from the USA, Australia, Canada, South Africa and the West Indies.

General Search Results

Occurrences of the surname Few in the Guild Indexes
(Click on the number to view the search results in each index. Indexes marked by * are only accessible by logged in Guild members.)
  • Global Marriages (public)  69
  • Global Marriages (members)* 70
  • Modern Newspaper Index  1
  • Probate Index* 3
  • References to the name Few in the Guild Journal  18

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