The Selves One-Name study commenced in 2019. Like many one-name studies, it grew out of an attempt to trace my own ancestry. I became fascinated by the story of my 3 x great-grandfather Thomas Selves, and his wrongful conviction for stealing soap and poultry in 1831 Woolwich. I realised that four of his siblings emigrated to America, so wondered where else Selves' would turn up. The name was registered with the Guild of One-Name Studies, during Roots Tech London in October 2019.

The Selves One-Name study forms a sub-set of my wider family research, under the Rees Scott Archive name.

My initial objective for the study is to identify all Selves BMD & Census records for the UK and US, up to 2007, and to then use that data to:

• Identify Family Groupings
• To identify the earliest usage of the name in the UK / US
• To identify migration of the name

At the moment the only registered name is Selves. I have not yet come across any actual variants - although there have been a number of transcription issues where the name has been recorded in indexes as:

• Salves
• Silves 

I will update this section as appropriate.

I have not yet determined an origin for the surname Selves. The name appears to have originated in Kent, England, particularly around the village of Staplehurst.

From the index of the England and Wales 1881 census produced by the Church of Latter Day Saints, there were 130 Selves recorded in that census. This gives a frequency of 1 in 199,803 or 0.00050% of the population.

A search on the ancestry.co.uk 1881 UK Census, records 140 Selves, all in England. This gives a frequency of 1 in 185,531 or 0.00053899% of the population.

A search on the ancestry.co.uk 1880 US Census, records 35 Selves in the United States. This gives a frequency of 1 in 1,433,977 or 0.0000697% of the population.

According to an ONS database there are some 162 Selves as of September 2002 in the UK. This gives a frequency of 1 in 331,695 or 0.0002978% of the population. This makes it an equal 24,177 most common name in England and Wales.

According to the forebears.io website the incidents of Selves surnames in 2014 were as follows:

There was a single incident of the surname in Georgia, Indonesia, Luxembourg, Madagascar, Dominican Republic, Singapore, China, Bulgaria, Venezuela, and Brazil.

In the 1881 UK Census the most populous counties are Kent (64) and London (56). There are smaller clusters for Surrey (7), Hampshire (5), Essex (4), Sussex (2) and Middlesex (2), all of which consist of a single family group.

In the 1880 US Census, the 35 records come from just 7 families: two in Ohio (3/10), two in Wisconsin (7/2), two in Missouri (5/3) and a single family of 5 in Minnesota.