The Guilding One Name Study began in 2014. The original effort was to build an accurate family tree going as far as available data allows, but while researching I began to record all instances of the name. Every instance of the name is within scope, whether Guilding is the surname or middle name, no matter the country nor the time frame.  Accuracy and completeness is particularly important to me and I've pro-actively researched around brick walls in research and verified false positives in digitised sources. My approach is to research all reasonable data points for every Guilding as this ensures that with confidence I can paint a picture of them, their family unit, their place in a larger family tree, and most importantly, to resolve duplicates and make corrections (eg. correct Guildings to Gildings or Gouldings).

The spelling becomes Gyldinge as you get back to the C17th/C16th.

Guilding may be a variant of Gilding. I would welcome any etymological research into either spelling.

A number of Guildings have said that Guilding is a Norman name, and arrived in Britain in the C11th. I have found no evidence to support this. There could be a connection with the Guise baronets and ultimately the House of Guise, a French noble family. Guildings have been tenant farmers on the Guise estate in Gloucestershire, England, going back to at least the C17th, so it seems possible that Gilding could have became Guilding in order to be more like the French name Guise. I have no evidence to support this theory.

Writing in Country Life, Howard Spring (1889-1965) suggests that Guldō/Guldon is the etymological predecessor of the name Guilding.

People of note:

• Reverend Lansdown Guilding (1797-1831) is the only Guilding to qualify for a Wikipedia entry.
  • Amazona guildingii is a species of parrot endemic to the island of St Vincent, named by the above.
  • Linckia guildingi is a species of marine sea star (starfish)
• Lansdown's brother John Guilding (1799-1864) was a pioneer settler in Australia and New Zealand.
• their father Reverend John Guilding (1766-1818) was at the time of an uprising, the Garrison Chaplain to British Colonial Forces on the Island of St Vincent.
• Catherine Frances Guilding née Gallie (1931-2006) was awarded the BEM in the 1991 New Year Honours.
• Muriel Alice Guilding née Springett (1912-2010) was awarded the BEM in the 1972 Queen's Birthday Honours.

Places of note:

• In Kings Stanley, nr Stroud, Gloucestershire, a residential road called Guildings Way is named for the family that lived at the nearby farm.
• A Tithing in the parish of Leonard Stanley, nr Stroud, Gloucestershire, was called The Guilding.
• Guilding Street is a residential road in Wingham, NSW, Australia.
• Guilding Terrace is a residential road at the Riverlea Park estate in Adelaide, Australia, named for Margaret Browne née Guilding (1822-1884).

This exhaustive study contains approximately 762 people with Guilding in their name, up to and including births in 2024. A family tree has been created, containing over 3,000 ancestors and descendants.

According to the ONS database, there were 102 people using the Guilding surname in Britain in 2002.

The county-level distribution of the surname in Britain in the 1881 Census can be seen at the Great Britain Family Names Profiling project.

• H.B.Guppy's book Homes of Family Names in Great Britain (1890) claims that the name Guilding is peculiar to Worcestershire, but his statistical analysis excluded occurances with a relative frequency of less than 7 per 10,000 names. For more information see the Modern British Surnames resource guide by the late Philip Dance.
• The name Guilding does not appear in Understanding English Surnames (1978) by William Addison.

Websites that I use for day-to-day research are:

• Ancestry, Findmypast, FamilySearch, MyHeritage, The Genealogist.
• Billion Graves, Deceased Online, Family Notices.

Region-specific sources include:

• UK: FreeBMD, GRO, National Archives, UK Wills and Probate, iAnnounce, The London Gazette, 192.com.
  • Gloucestershire: Glos Archives, Glos 1909 Survey, Gloucestershire Family History Society.
  • Saint Vincent: UCL Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery.
• ANZ: DigitalNZ, Trove, NZ BMD, NZ Papers Past, State Libraries.
• Canada: Censuses, BMD, 411.com.