Guild of One-Name Studies
One-name studies, Genealogy
Study: Thew
Variants: Thewe, Thewes, Thews
Category: 2 - A study where research using core genealogical datasets and transcriptions is well under way, but currently in some countries only.
Contact: Mr John Thew
I started the Thew One-Name Study when, like so many fellow genealogists, I decided to go sideways in order to go further back. I had traced my direct line from Woolwich, London via Guernsey and Gibraltar back to Alnwick, Northumberland, where I found far more Thews than I had been used to.
Separating cousins from siblings lead to following Thews to elsewhere in Northumberland, then Durham, then the rest of England and the World. Especially those who emigrated to America, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Several of whom returned to fight in WWI and WWII. And I've remembered all of the former on The Imperial War Museum's website Lives of the First World War.
So far I have twelve Thew trees, all with known English "origins". Seven of which have their earliest recorded members living in the North East. I'm building these trees from a single Excel spreadsheet that now has over 3,000 people who have been recorded as Thew on at least one UK record, be it census, parish, bmd, or otherwise. I've identified spouses for 100s of these Thews, so do get in touch if I can help with your research. Plus there's a well-established line in America that's stalled at John Thew, a sea captain from the early 1700s, who may have been Welsh. Although I'm yet to find any Welsh parish records of that time that record Thews.
I'm trying to merge several of these trees and, hopefully, our fledgling DNA study will help with that ambition. We also have an active Facebook group, with regular contributors from all around the world. I welcome opportunities to collaborate with anyone interested in the Thew surname, other surnames Thews have married into (or come from), anything to do with notable Thews (be it inventors, decorated war heroes, actors or the more notorious!) and anything to do with the places Thews have lived.
Also on the (long) to do list is to finally build a Thew website.
Several parish, and earlier, records contain spellings such as Thewe and Thewes, which are now more widely in use elsewhere in Europe than in the UK. There are a few incidents of these spellings in post-1837 bmd and 1841 onwards census. But many of these are actually transcription errors. I will research all of them ultimately. As well as exploring several lines that have, for example, changed from Tew to Thew, or Thow to Thew, and vice versa.
Today, there are Thews on many continents - especially Europe, North America and Australia - but a lot of us descend from ancestors who first appear in English parish records from Bedfordshire, Norfolk, Northumberland and Lincolnshire. I've traced my direct family line back to at least 1608 in Alnwick, Northumberland but the Pipe Rolls for Alnwick record Thews as early as the 1100s. There are many Thews/Thewes in Germany - and family tales of Norse ancestry are many-fold - which is backed up by the few DNA results in our fledgling study.
The Thew (surname) page on Wikipedia currently records six notable Thews. Seven if you include William Thew who was recorded in 1197 in the pipe roll for Alnwick, Northumberland, for being "charged 12d. for an enclosure from a forest".
In 1881 the frequency of the Thew surname in the UK was 15 occurrences per million names, which had decreased to 13 occurrences per million names by 1998. Internationally, the frequency of the surname Thew per million names was highest in Australia with 43.36 instances per million names, followed by New Zealand at 19.05 per million, the United States at 2.6 per million and Canada with only 1.6 per million.
I have taken both Y-DNA (with FTDNA) and Family Finder (with Ancestry) but we need many more participants in order to link trees together. Especially as my direct ancestor William Thew was baptised at St Michael, Alnwick on 17 June 1810 as the illegitimate DAUGHTER of William Thew and Elizabeth Hunter, single woman. Which may explain why my DNA matches closely with many people in the Hall Y-DNA study.