Or how this all started…

I’d recently discovered that the GRO indexes now had mother’s maiden names, which had enabled some further lines of enquiry. The only problem was their search was a bit annoying - you had to choose either birth or death, either male or female and you could only search for up to 2 years either side of your chosen year so I’d been writing a script to do the leg work of selecting the years and clicking search over and over again as I looked for potential matches. The first part of the script was now working and I extracted all the Furney births and opened it in a spreadsheet. There were patterns of families grouped by location and mother’s maiden surname and their weren’t THAT many. 133 after I’d removed some duplicates. 133 people called Furney registered over the 79 year period from 1837 to 1916.

I wanted a way to record family groupings and show them geographically year by year. I started thinking about a possible schema to represent what I wanted to capture..

It occurred to me that I’d just end up building some version of extremely limited genealogy software if I kept going. I wanted something which had a simplish structure, but with some great graphics. I started googling genealogy software all over again and happened upon a blog post of someone talking about using Family History for their ‘one-name study’. Thirty minutes and several pages of web content later I realised that a one-name study was not only a thing, but also quite a popular thing. I searched the Guild’s one-name study index. No Furneys! Surprise surprise!! The membership and registration was doable. I registered the furney.io domain in anticipation.