Scope
Many people conducting family history, genealogical or onomastic research may conduct a one-name study of a surname in a given period or locality quite informally.
A full one-name study can be daunting, particularly if the surname is very common. Conversely, a rare surname can be difficult to trace. Since such studies are usually conducted by individuals as a pastime, they are generally only feasible when a surname is not used by more than a couple of thousand contemporary people, so that the total historical data-set is numbered in the low tens of thousands. Where a surname is used by hundreds of thousands, or millions of people, it would be practically impossible to differentiate these persons using national-index data alone.
In some countries, one-name studies are impossible, since surnames are not used at all or in the case of names such as Singh may represent religious practice rather than an ancestry. Since a majority of human societies are patronymic, one-name studies generally focus on male succession and ignore family relationships through marriage.
Some researchers are satisfied to collect all information and group it geographically, approximately representing the different family groups. Others attempt to reconstruct lineages. Because of the wider scope of a one-name study, and transcription or OCR errors in the indexes employed, lineage-making cannot be done with as much accuracy as in a single-family genealogy.
In most one-name studies, a united lineage will not be discovered, but a broad perspective can be achieved, giving clues to name origin and migrations. Many researchers are motivated to go beyond the one-name-study stage and to compile fully researched, single-family histories of some of the families they discover.
Read more about this topic: One-name Study
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