The Guild of One-Name Studies (GOONS) has reached the significant milestone of its 6,000th member.
The Guild has announced: “The 6,000th member is Mrs Sue Fisher-Pascall who lives in Chichester, in the UK. This milestone follows a very successful year for the Guild in 2010-11 when it achieved its highest number of new members ever.
“Of the 387 new members joining in 2011, 220 were from the UK, 69 from the US, 33 from New Zealand, 26 from Australia, 17 from Canada and 15 from Ireland. The remainder were from various European countries. 43% of the new members were from non-UK regions, which is a valuable step towards increased worldwide membership to the Guild.
“Sue is studying the surname Pascall, with the variants Pascal, Pashal and Paskal, and hopes that the Guild of One-Name Studies will enable her to help and link up with other people researching the same. Sue Fisher-Pascall said she was interested in the Guild of One-Name Studies because she had already done a lot of research on the Pascall surname generally, as part of her own family history, and joining seemed the logical way forward to share her research with other people researching the surname or one of its variants.
“Sue had previously considered joining the Guild but found that the surname Pascall had already been registered by another Guild member as a variant of their main study. When it was agreed that the surname could stand in its own right, she immediately joined the Guild and registered the surname as her one-name study. In recognition of becoming the 6,000 member of the Guild of One-Name Studies, the Guild has extended Sue’s membership a further year to the 31st October 2014.”
At the GOONS website, you can find out:
- more about undertaking a one-name study;
- the benefits of joining the Guild of One-Name Studies, and the assistance members of the Guild can provide to anyone researching their family history on any of the 8,000 plus names currently being researched.
Cliff Kemball, the Guild’s Publicity Officer, said today: “Attaining our 6,000th member is a significant milestone for the Guild of One-Name Studies and is a testament to the continued development of the Guild internationally and the benefits membership provides. We are sure that Mrs Sue Fisher-Pascall will benefit significantly from joining the Guild and that she will gradually take advantage of the services and facilities that the Guild offers.”
The Guild explains that a one-name study is a project researching facts about a surname and all the people who have held it, as opposed to a particular pedigree (the ancestors of one person) or descendancy (the descendants of one person or couple). The Guild is a charitable organization dedicated to promoting the public understanding of one-name studies and the preservation and accessibility of the resultant information. Founded in 1979, the Guild now has over 2,500 members spread across the world, studying over 8,000 individual surnames.
The Pascall name was brought to England in the wave of migration that followed the Norman Conquest of 1066. In England the family is first found in Essex where they held a family seat from very early times, reputedly granted lands by Duke William of Normandy for their distinguished assistance at the Battle of Hastings in 1066.
