Beyond the Tree: Taking a fresh look at surname studies with Name & Place

I’m looking forward to speaking with you all soon at the Surname Studies Society’s online meeting. It’s always good to be among people who know first-hand what it’s like to follow a surname across time and place, and who understand that it’s rarely as simple as building a straightforward family tree.

As you’ll know from your own research, surname studies are quite different from traditional genealogy. Of course we care about who begat whom, but we’re just as invested in everyone who bore the name, where they lived, how they moved, the trades they followed, the communities they were part of. It means our research is rarely a straightforward line of descent. Instead, it sprawls outward into clusters, patterns, migrations, and networks of relationships that often defy simple charts.

Seeing beyond the family tree

This is something I explore in Beyond the Tree, where I set out why it pays to move away from purely ancestor-focused thinking. By putting people, places, events, facts and relationships all on an equal footing, we can see our surname studies in a far richer, more revealing light.

I suspect many of you have naturally evolved this mindset already. After all, when you’re working with a surname, you can’t help but look sideways, following everyone who shares the name, not just the ones who happen to land in your direct line. You’ll have wrestled with the same dilemmas: partial connections, people who appear once and vanish, tantalising possibilities that might join two clusters together, or prove to be an unrelated red herring entirely.

The power of a structured approach

Where I think we can give ourselves a real edge is by embracing structured data. Rather than forcing everything into a tree or a series of unlinked notes, we can let each piece of evidence stand on its own, then deliberately connect it by relationships we can trace: shared addresses, occupations, neighbours, witnesses, executors. It’s a way to capture the true web of a surname’s history.

This pays off in countless ways. When a stray burial pops up in a nearby parish, or you stumble on a will that mentions names from two different branches, you can see at once how it might fit or spark new avenues to explore. You also build a far more robust audit trail. Every fact is tied to its source, every link documented, so there’s less risk of well-intentioned guesswork hardening into “truth.”

How Name & Place fits in

When I created Name & Place, it was to give this kind of structured approach a proper home. The software grew out of exactly the frustrations we all face: trying to squeeze complex surname studies into tools built for direct-line family trees. Name & Place is just as happy handling one-name studies, one-place studies, or wider local histories, because at its heart it treats all these elements, the people, places, events, relationships, with equal weight and importance.

For surname research, this means you can build the foundations in your data to:

• Map the spread of your name over time and geography. Watch how it shifts from a handful of villages in the 1700s to new clusters in market towns or industrial centres by the 1800s.
• Spot recurring trades, roles or social patterns. Perhaps your surname keeps cropping up among millers, or appears time and again on parish councils, or as witnesses to each other’s baptisms and marriages.
• Keep hold of those crucial fragments. No need to fudge a witness or a godparent into a tree where they don’t belong. They can stand on their own, linked by event, place and association, ready for when more evidence turns up.
• Record uncertainty with confidence. We’ve all had moments of “could this be the same John Smith who was in the next village ten years earlier?” With a structured approach, you can note these hypotheses clearly without blurring them into established connections.
• Tell deeper stories. Because your data isn’t locked into rigid trees, it’s easy to pivot. You can build narratives around migrations, economic shifts, or how a surname waxed and waned across counties over generations.

This kind of research doesn’t just produce better charts or reports, it gives you a way to truly honour the story of the name you’re studying.

Looking ahead to the talk

At our session, I’ll show how all of this plays out with real examples, from my own research and from broader history projects, and give a look at how Name & Place handles it under the bonnet. My hope is you’ll come away with ideas and practical insights you can use straight away in your own study, whether or not you ever use my software.

And of course, I’m looking forward to hearing how you’ve tackled these same challenges. After all, who better than fellow surname enthusiasts to appreciate the strange joys of chasing a name through scattered registers, half-legible wills, and the occasional stroke of pure luck?

I hope to see you there.

Paul Carter, July 2025