WHY A ONE NAME STUDY?

First Steps    

I became interested in family history research during the mid 1980's, when I got the Genealogy bug. Unfortunately I lived over 100 miles from were my Grandparents had originated from. This meant, to follow  the trail in depth I had to make many visits to Nottingham, both to the local library and the County Record Office. It took a number of years before I was able to compile a detailed family history of the Bignall's of Nottinghamshire up to the 20th Century. 

The end result of this research was I had been able to trace the family tree back to County Down, Northern Ireland when in 1770 Robert Bignall enlisted in the 57th Regiment of Foot. He served 24 years in the Army and was pensioned out in 1794 and settled in Nottingham.  

One Name Study

In 1992 I received a letter from a researcher called Des Sant from Stafford, who was researching the Bagnall surname and had registered it with the Guild of One Name Studies. He was collecting as much data about the surname and similar spellings. We meet and exchanged theories on the origins of the names of Bagnall and Bignall and decided that although there very similar in spelling there were no proof that one had derived from the other. After several years of research, Des found he could no longer pursue his project and so I decided to add my Surname to the study to extend the knowledge of both Surnames.

The Task ahead.

Therefore the task ahead, is to record all references to both names and their derivatives with a view to making cross references and proving relationships. To avoid duplication of effort, I have concentrated mainly on the published records of the (16-18 C) as I thought most family historians would start from the 20th Century backwards.

I hope the visitors to this web site will find it interesting enough to make a comment and hopeful give details of their family history research so that I can add them to my database and may be help another in the future.

Please bear with me as I develop my Web page building skills as well as completing various research projects.

Current Projects.

• Researching the published books of "The Record Society / The Index Society"
• Completing the details from the index of the Staffordshire Advertiser
• Researching the business history of John Bagnall & Sons of Wednesbury and West Bromwich
• Transcribing the Bagnall Manuscripts at the William Salt Library, Stafford.

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David Bignall, Guild on One Name Studies No. 2702
Copyright © 2000 [Denbigh Enterprises]. All rights reserved. All trademarks or product names mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.
Revised: January 29, 2000 .