PASSING THE TORCH

Thank you to Paul, who took on a project that was untried and became a rather large initiative.  His post below is an excellent summary. It is just a fact that without Paul the bumpy start to this concept would never have achieved what it did.  My own contributions never met their unrealistic goals - oh sure I will cover every Ruby in Canada - and due to many shifting priorities, my commitment regretfully decreased as time progressed but Paul persevered and never gave up the goal - Kudos!

Peggy Chapman

This is the final note from me as project manager for the initial stage of the Ruby One-Name Study, started by the Guild of One-Name Studies as a means of demonstrating what Guild members could do when working together in a tight timetable to celebrate the Guild’s 40^th birthday in September 2019.

We started this project early in 2018 when three of us, me in Florida, Peggy in Canada and Karen in Australia had a few video-conference discussions to figure out how best to take forward some of the ideas developed in initial project planning.   I thank them particularly for their enthusiasm for the project and the thought they put into it.

Key decisions

Among the key decisions we made were to:

• focus on family reconstruction as the main means of demonstrating what Guild members can do. Many Guild members amass large amounts of data on holders of their study surname and then analyze it at their leisure in what is often a lifetime’s work.  There is no value in raw data, however, and it’s a difficult part of a One-Name study for outsiders to appreciate.  So we focused on the issue most visible to outsiders.
• work with a few core data sets for each country to be sure that we weren’t duplicating work and to act as a gauge for how much work we had done and how much remained
• produce a style guide which made some attempt at standardizing the way our team members worked without destroying the initiative and creativity of team members.
• make a file called BSO (for Bright Shiny Objects!) - items which looked interesting but which would distract from our main effort.  Sadly, we didn’t come back to that in the time allotted but the list exists.

Achievements

In the past 18 months, we have:

• attracted a team of 35 or so volunteers
• written at least one blog post each month describing different aspects of the study and some interesting stories about Ruby people
• built a database at ruby.one-name.net with over 16,300 people in it, containing Ruby people from a huge variety of different countries around the world.
• made some progress in finding the roots of the surname.  The oldest occurrences we have found are in Switzerland, but there are apparently separate families in Denmark, England, France, Ireland and Portugal.  As some of our blog posts indicate too, many immigrants to English speaking countries whose home country names meant something like “red stone” also selected Ruby as their surname.

Summary

We have certainly proved the concept.  Although most Guild members normally work alone, we found a way to collaborate and I’m pleased that the final product looks reasonably consistent, and not at all the jumble that we would have produced had we all gone our separate ways.

What were the most difficult aspects of collaboration?

Two things:

• Herding cats! Being honest, not everyone found it easy to work in the same way and it took effort to bring some folks into line, but with goodwill on all sides we managed it.
• Herding software cats!  GEDcom files are increasingly difficult to swap between different family history packages.  The software providers have an incentive to make their products increasingly different.  

What gave the greatest pleasure?

This is a simple one: Guild members pushing themselves to do new things.  I’m thinking of three examples in particular:

• Margaret, who took on the task of looking at vital records for the town of Hunspach in Alsace, France, where the main language was German.  Not only did she have to cope with early German spellings, and old style handwriting but also with the vagaries of the French post-revolutionary Napoleonic calendar.
• Peter, who figured out a way to take data from US state voter lists and turn them into usable GEDcom files for importing into our software, and then wrote a very readable blog post about how he did it.  I know he has stimulated other members to try something similar. 
• Several relatively new Guild members who joined us for the experience and tell me they have learned a lot.  Joan wrote, saying, “I think all newcomers to the Guild doing a One-Name Study should help on a project like Ruby.  Their own ONS would not seem quite so daunting!” 

The future

The Guild committee hoped that we would find some people named Ruby to take over from our team.  Job done.  We had contact with three other researchers born with the Ruby name and two of them so far

have committed to continuing our work. All our materials and the two websites will be handed over to the new team for them to build on.  In discussions with them, I’ve emphasized the need to have fun with it, maybe take a few items from our BSO file and start with them.  Both are much younger than the average Guild member and both have good IT skills.  So, unlike the original Guild team, they have the luxury of time; for them, it’s a marathon, not a sprint!  Good luck, folks.

Finally, I just want to give a huge vote of thanks to all those Guild members, listed at the bottom right of the Ruby Study home page, who have helped over the past 18 months.  It was a pleasure working with you all.