Welcome also BOWS, BOWE, BOW, BOE and other possible variants!   

WHY STUDY A SURNAME?

# 1 Reason: It's fun and a great mental challenge! 

# 2 Reason: While family lore and the internet harbor treasures for genealogists, they can both spread oversimplified –- sometimes even false -– family history and surname information. Our complex surname leads to a lot of confusion that's waiting to be clarified in detail. As examples:

  • It has separate origins in Ireland and England (we may have found a third in Scotland!)
  • It's not small or local enough to yield satisfactory results from a brief study
  • It's not important enough –- in the case of all but one of its English lineages -– to be well documented already
  • DNA research is uncovering multiple Y chromosome lineages that are forming into unrelated subgroups

WHAT HAPPENS IN A ONE-NAME STUDY?

A comprehensive, centralized one-name study covers a surname and its variants worldwide to develop a complete and accurate record. While supporting the single-lineage researcher and archiving surname-related documents, it seeks to identify the surname's characteristics, including:

  • origins
  • meaning
  • distribution and frequency
  • emigration patterns
  • variants
For a medium-sized surname study such as this, we can only really begin to articulate these characteristics with any certainty after collecting a large body of data that can be properly synthesized.

A WORK IN PROGRESS

All information at this site is subject to future modification as research warrants.

Guild of One-Name Studies Logo

Guild of One-Name Studies
Founded 1979
Member #5048 Since 2004

SITE TIPS

SITE SEARCH

The site search field (upper right) searches this website but not the embedded spreadsheet or document contents in the Records section. To search these use your browser's Edit > Find function.

NAVIGATION TIPS

The Top Level Pages in sections and subsections contain background information and research findings on their topic. It's best to read these context pages from the top-most down to the more particular data that may interest you.

In the Records section, check the country heading pages for some links to other records online (free and for pay).