RUBY One-Name Study : studying the Ruby surname across the world

Field Notes from our Washington Correspondent From time to time, our Washington correspondent will share his experiences as a Ruby One-Name Study volunteer.  Mark starts with Ruby families who first appear in the 1900 Census as a resident of Washington.  As Mark describes in his post, people do not stay within state boundaries. Find out how the Washington researcher became a Pennsylvania researcher! It also highlights how a one-name study differs from researching your own line - there are no clues from family stories and knowledge to help you along the path.  Progress Report My first Ruby tree started out with James Ruby, a middle-aged bachelor logger living in 1900 in the Cascade Mountains foothills southeast of Seattle. James was born about 1852 and came west from York County, Pennsylvania, certainly sometime after the 1870 census and possibly before the 1880 census, in which I was unable to locate him (Washington didn't gain statehood until 1889, but was inc...

Learnings from the Ruby study   #1 – Impact of the new GRO index One of the first things to do when starting out on a new One-Name Study is to construct some core data sets.   Apart from being a requirement set by the Guild, there are several other reasons why it makes sense to do this. 1.      These lists act as helpful checklists as one reconstructs families 2.      They can also be a useful reminder of the scale of the study in different countries and thus possibly aid in decision-making about where to start 3.      As one notes which individuals from each data set have been included the notes can be used as a means of checking progress and ultimately for answering the question, “How will you know you have finished?” The initial Ruby team constructed core data sets for several countries: notably Canada, England and Wales, France, Ireland, New Zealand, Scotland, and the USA.   The original England ...

Welcome to the Ruby surname blog!   We are a small team of Guild of One-Name Studies members who came together to undertake a project to honour the Guild’s 40 th anniversary in September 2019.   And what is the Guild, you ask?   For readers who are not members, the Guild is a non-profit society of those who work on or have an interest in one-name studies, or surname studies.   While traditional genealogy/family history works on a person’s own family line, a one-name study takes on the study of one surname (and perhaps its variants).   To learn more about this, and what motivates people to take on what seems a daunting task, visit the Guild’s website at one-name.org .   Be warned: one-name studies are known to be addictive. Why Ruby ?   For those of you who track such things, the ruby gemstone is associated with a 40 th anniversary and seemed an appropriate choice.   In looking into the surname, what became apparent was its multina...