About the One-name Study
The Beginning of the Study. Around 1972, I developed a serious interest in my own ancestry; because I had lived outside the county for so long because of my air force career, I began to re–establish contact with the Cornwall relatives and began to find out much about my more recent ancestry. By 1975 I started to find out something about my ARGALL grandfather’s family. However, it was not until 1990 when, because of the rapid strides made in the availability of genealogical information coupled with the advances made in information technology, I was able to marshal this data in a more organised way. Since 1990, when I bought my first computer, my progress became more rapid.
I corresponded with numerous other persons mainly in the United States and Australia, but also in England, New Zealand and South Africa, which enabled me to recreate many of the ARGALL families from the past. However, this approach threw up almost as many problems for events in England as it solved. I obtained extracts of ARGALL birth, marriages and deaths, some of which served to confuse simply because of the multiplicity of the same forenames living in the same area at the same time. It then fell to a patient analysis of the original records (Parish records, Wills and Census information) to establish who was born where. By 1994 I finally concluded the investigation of all ARGALL entries in the indexes of the UK's General Register Office in London up to that date; these entries are updated annually as more registers are added.
The need to solve these problems caused me to embark on a total study of all occurrences of the ARGALL surname and so in 1992 I registered the ARGALL name with the Guild of One–name Studies in London. The objective of the study is to establish the origins of the ARGALL family and to determine and record its growth and development throughout the world. When I retired in 1996, I resolved to undertake research on behalf of the global Argall family on a virtual full–time basis. By the beginning of 2012, the Study had grown to a database size containing over 10000 individuals and almost 3700 marriages of those who are, and which are, connected with the ARGALL name and families. (Please see the Site Announcement box on the right for the latest total)’. These figures represent, I believe, about 97% of all the ARGALLs who ever lived.
Organisation of the Study. This Study is organised in Sections as follows:
- Family Name
- Coats of Arms
- Family Origins
- Early Argall Family Movement
- Family Development in London, Essex and Kent
- The Move to Madron and Surrounding Areas
- Family Dispersal from Madron
- The Situation in England at the beginning of the 21st Century
- Outside the United Kingdom
- Family Tree Database
- Acknowledgements
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