THE speaker for the February meeting of the Frome Family History Group was professor Richard Coates.
He described the University of West of England project, Family Names of the United Kingdom known as FaNUCK. FaNUCK’s advantage over previous studies is that it is evidence based and used digital resources, improving connections between medieval and modern times.
The start of the talk began with an outline of the project and mentioning some of the people involved together with their contribution. The project is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and published by Oxford University Press. The main aims of the project include research into the history of language and dialects and the geographical and social distribution of surnames.
The psychology of surnames was also discussed such as why women change their names upon marriage or not as the case may be. The social advantage of having a surname beginning with a letter earlier in the alphabet compared to the end of the alphabet was intriguing.
Some of the sources used for the project were discussed. These include the Reaney and Wilson Dictionary of English Surnames which was discovered to be 50% inaccurate as well as government documents such as the Patent Rolls, the database of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Guild of One-Name Studies.
We moved on to the scope of the project which is the most ambitious in Great Britain with 45,602 names being researched between 1881-2011. Of these 27,000 were variants for example Smith, Smyth and Smythe.
The four main types of names, such as relationship, for example Richard, Richards and Richardson were then described. We then have nicknames, Witty, Proud, Toogood and Shakelady.
Occupational names come next with Fisher and Latimer being good examples and finally status names such as Butler, Marshall, Bishop and King.
Finally, we discussed the topographical distribution of surnames including the most common Somerset surnames, Ackland, Bartlett, Dando and Kingsbury.
A very appreciative audience who were keen to apply their new found knowledge to their own family research, thanked professor Coates.
Our next event will be on Tuesday 26th March where Wendy Worley will be giving a talk entitled “From Anecdotes and Aural History to Publication.”