In the 1970s I began to wonder where my surname came from and whether the occasional Nation I met who was not a known member of my family was related to me. My father had died when I was only 12 but I knew that my paternal grandfather, who died before I was born, had been born in Taunton so I started searching for records of his family by visiting the only known 1^st cousin of my father who was still living in Taunton. She gave me sufficient information about the immediate family members to enable me to approach the Staplegrove vicar to ask permission to examine parish registers for marriages, baptisms and deaths. In those pre internet days there were no

computerised records available. There followed over 50 years of searching records at what was then the Somerset Record Office, and elsewhere, as time allowed.

More recently the internet and computerisation have opened up incredible opportunities to add to the data and construct families in order to link them together or prove their lack of interconnectedness.

Whilst these seemed initially to be confined to Nation or Nations, other possibilities have emerged, including Nacion and Nashen.

It is difficult to find suggestions in most learned works on surnames. The two or three there are cannot agree and are less than convincing! One objective of this study is to shed more light on this.

It is difficult to find suggestions of the origin of the surname in most learned works on surnames. The two or three there are cannot agree and are less than convincing! One objective of this study is to shed more light on this.

As with most families, many Nations have been lowly agricultural labourers. However, some have become wealthy, acquired large estates and fame and fortune. The name appears amongst plantation and slave owners, convicted murderers, rebels, senior military officers, prominent sportspeople and in the theatre and cultural life.

The bulk of the earliest references occur in the parish of Bishops Lydeard, 5 miles from the centre of Taunton in the county of Somerset.

The surname is rare, not in the top 1000 according to Find My Past. However, over the centuries the name can be found all over Britain and even further afield. It is a westcountry name with 72% of parish baptisms 1560-1640 having been in Somerset. Indeed, it is not until the 1880s that the percentage of Nations born or living outside Somerset exceeds 50%.

Extensive data about all Nations that we have documented can be found at nationstudy.com This includes a growing amount of DNA evidence made possible by volunteers joining the study

The availability of paper records is patchy. It only became a legal requirement to formally register births, marriages and deaths in 1837. Prior to that family historians rely upon parish registers which are often far from complete. Even census records available in one form or another from 1841 to 1939, can be incomplete or inaccurate. The discovery of DNA and the ability to use it to suggest or even prove, family links can fill in the gaps and is increasingly being used to discover connections of which people have previously been totally unaware. Participants take a harmless genealogy test where the result is 37 numbers representing counts of short repeats of DNA at locations on the Y-chromosome. The result contains no personal information. Since the Y-chromosome is passed from father to son, typically unchanged, it follows the path of the surname in most societies. Therefore, this test is very powerful for genealogy.

nationstudy.com