One name studies

[Chasing Caseys]

Once again i dont know where to post this as i havnt found a General forum without having to find a place ie Essex. If anyone can tell me where then i will move it. The person that had this name was Scottish so maybe i will
post it on the Scottish forum as well but which one !!

The question is i have just looked on S.O.G at the one name studies under T looking for Townlie and its not there. I have also looked on the Romany Gypsy site as ive been told this could be a Romany name and its not on there either.

Any suggestions ?

Tracey

[AnnB]

I hope I'm not telling you the obvious, but the name has possibly recorded as Townley ;)
Best wishes
Ann

[Chasing Caseys]

Hi Ann

I wished it had been ! But no she is definitly Townlie only once has it been spelt wrong and that was on her school admissions register !

[Peter Goodey]

Townley is certainly the commonest spelling.

Funny old distribution of the surname. It seems to be mainly Westmoreland/Lancashire and thereabouts followed by the Oxfordshire/Northants region.

Strange. Perhaps it derives from two completely different sources.

[Peter Goodey]

There wasn't a single TOWNLIE in the 1881 census (LDS version), including Scotland.

Potential for quite a short one-name study :D :D :D

[Chasing Caseys]

Up until the 50,s my family were giving their children two or three sir names as middle names some unconnected to existing family names.
One even has Campbell Donaldson as a name ! how dare they mention those two in the same breath !

[Chasing Caseys]

No, she was born in 1883 Aberdeen. Her name was Lily Townlie Gray Geddes later changed to Geddes Gray.

[Mythology]

I think it is likely that a "Townley" study would, in any case, include Townlie as a variant.

If it's not listed, that simply means that nobody has registered the name with the Guild of One Name Studies. Basically, it's a case of what individual people have submitted, not some organised group effort attempting to, say, sort all records into alphabetical order and produce a list for each name.

They *can* be useful at times, depending on what the submitter has actually done, but many one-name studies are more of interest to statisticians than to family historians.

If, for example, you were to register the Townley/Townlie name, limit the period to, say 1754-1901, and just submit a list of all entries of that name on the IGI, in the GRO index, and in the various census indexes, that's a "One Name Study". Not a very good one, but it would do for starters!

Of the names of mine that are covered, I can't honestly say that I've found much that I didn't already have from relatively easily accessible sources, and in most cases nothing whatsoever.

I will not start throwing personal brickbats by naming the study concerned, but the one that *would* have been most useful if it had been done sensibly has been rendered absolutely worthless IMO by the person's decision to include references from un-named "other sources", which includes all the rubbish in sloppily "researched"(?) family trees - nonsense entries based on the fact that somebody was "of" a certain place in their will, so in the opinion of the "researcher" they must have been born there, complete garbage.

Each to their own, but I am, as you will have gathered, not a fan of them.

[Geoffers]

I wished it had been ! But no she is definitly Townlie only once has it been spelt wrong and that was on her school admissions register !
Names did not become finally fixed until the start of the 20th century, up 'til then surnames are often spelt in a variety of ways - so it would be wrong to think in terms of a name being spelt incorrectly. TOWNLIE is the spellnig in teh entry you've found, but do look for variants such as TOWNLEY, TOWNELEY, etc.

Geoffers
Charlbury, Oxfordshire
with TOWNLEY/TOWNELEY, TOWNLIE ancestors from Lancashire.