The following announcement was written by the Guild of One-Name Studies (London, UK and Salt Lake City, Utah -September 6, 2016):
The online resource helps people trace the possible origins and variations of their last name.
The Guild of One-Name Studies, a charitable organization that promotes facts about given surnames, and FamilySearch International, a nonprofit and the largest genealogy organization in the world, announced today that the guild’s collections will now be searchable at FamilySearch.org.
The partnership gives guild members another source for preserving their great work while also allowing more researchers across the globe to benefit from exploring the variant spellings of their personal surnames and possibly connect with others throughout the world who have the same last name.
The study of one’s last name (or surname) involves researching all known occurrences of that particular surname in all identifiable resources worldwide, as opposed to researching only the ancestors or descendants of a person. These rich compiled studies can assist a family history researcher to see the geographical distribution of surnames in their tree over centuries, which can help in reconstructing family lines bearing variants of those names. A common hope of customers who use surname studies is to identify the actual geographic locale of origin of a family surname. This outcome could very well happen for unique surnames, but common surnames that reflect an occupation (such as “Farmer” or “Fisher”) or patronymic-type surnames (such as “Johnson” or “Williamson”) may not have a single place of origin.
For more information on this historic collaboration, please read Dick Eastman’s blog post.