Explore the Old Family Names of Hampshire and their Historic Connections to the county, its Places and Events across the centuries
Do you know if you family name originates in Hampshire in the UK? How far back does your family name go in Hampshire, is it several centuries or more? Do you know the origin of your name and the geographic roots of your family name and different versions of it? Why not take a browse and maybe join in and share in this online intriguing experiment.
It maybe difficult to identify your direct descendants before the 17th century but we are beginning to gather data and explore the roots of Family Names in Hampshire, their relationship to the local and wider history of this county and how certain families are embroiled in shaping that history back to Domesday and beyond. Inevitably there are some names that can be traced and localized if you dig-back far enough and can correlate a lot of data sources it gets interesting to see how the same family names are often very localized. We are interested in finding the connections not only of direct descendants but in terms of where a name hails from and in particular where over several centuries at least, a name can be evidenced as being very localized within Hamsphire. The origins and correlation with the local history certainly reveal a lot of context about this intriguing county. This is an ongoing experiment and we will be starting with just a few but we hope over time others will share data and contribute and we can look to publish and share the data we all collect. We don’t want this just to be a list of records we want to tap into the where, who, when and why with Hampshire as the common component.
Think of this as a mini ‘Big Data’ project, we will need lots of data as well as narrative maps, documents and of course original records and transcription. It would be great to collaborate on this but we are going to just give it a go and see if we can find some patterns by using a range of data and digital humanities approaches. We will post articles, share schedules of records, build online maps, publish contextual photographs and look to collect related family tries so that others with connections to this county or simply a passing interest can take a look and maybe start their own adventure focused on other counties in particular those nearby our borders.
This page will be an anchor point for data and any related articles but where we are tracing clusters of old names we will also create anchor pages for the locations we are beginning to explore the local history of and collect a rich tapestry (we hope) of sources and records and tools you can dip-in and out of…
This has huge scope we know but the process will be fun and the more data we can share and correlate using some great tools to help mine and visualise the data and then drill down into the details the better.
If you are up for a bit of an online adventure then just contact us and let us know the names within Hampshire you are interested in then let’s see what we can together discover.
