How to join the Guild

The Guild welcomes members who have an interest in one-name studies. It is not necessary to register a study name in order to join.

The joining subscription is on a sliding scale, depending on the month of application, and will cover up to 23 months until the renewal date (1 November). Full details of the subscription fees can be seen on the Membership subscription page. Payment is accepted in any of the six currencies indicated.

You can join the Guild either by post or online.

Joining online through this website

To join online, fill in the online Membership Application Form, which calculates the appropriate joining subscription for the current month. This will allow you to pay your subscription either by PayPal or by credit card, in any of the currencies indicated.

Joining by post

To join by post, use the links on the Membership subscription page, to download the appropriate Membership Application Form for your country and the currency in which you wish to pay. The application form will show the table of subscriptions depending on the month of joining, to allow you to select the correct fee. Fill in the form and send it with your subscription to the Guild Registrar at the address shown on the form.

Completing the Application Form

The Guild likes to be as friendly as it can, recording the names of its members in the Register of One-Name Studies with a forename and a surname. The forename you give should be the one by which you would like to be known.

There may be space constraints on the display of your address in the printed version of the Register, and we may need to curtail your address, for instance by omitting a house name or by using abbreviations.

It is a condition of membership that your contact details (postal address and email address if you have one) will be stored in our database and will appear in the printed Register of One-Name Studies. The Register circulates widely in its paper and online versions amongst genealogists of all kinds, not just one-namers. The Guild takes care, however, to ensure that members’ data is held securely and cannot be automatically harvested from our website.

Registering a One-Name Study

You do not have to register the surname you are studying; instead you can join as an ordinary member and still gain from most of the Guild’s facilities and benefits. You can apply to register a study at any time you feel ready.

However, if you want to register a study now, the membership application form – either the online form, or the downloadable printed form – has a section for you to do this. Please note that there is a separate one-off registration fee payable for each study registered, but a single surname registration can include a reasonable number of variants.

Guild Subscribers

The Guild, by its Constitution, accepts only individuals as members (although there is nothing to prevent an individual who is a member of an organisation from joining). However, organisations or institutions may become subscribers to the Guild and receive the Guild’s journal. See the page on becoming a Guild subscriber.