My one-name study journey began quite recently after years of chasing and documenting my own pedigree, I remember being told when I was a child that there were other Thorpe's living in our town but they weren't related to us and I couldn't quite wrap my head around that idea. fast forward 30 years and the Study has now been registered with the Guild of One-Name Studies in 2023 to track the movement's of the Thorpe's and their variants.

In my time researching I have come across a few steadfast non-mistake variants in the records including Tharp, Tharpe, Thorp, Throop, Torp

This is an ancient name of Anglo-Saxon and Old Scandinavian origin, and is a locational surname from any of the places in England named with Old Norse or Old Danish element þorp, or the rarer Olde English pre 7th Century þrop. Generally, "thorp(e)" in a placename indicates that it was an area of Danish settlement. The word means a small hamlet or village that grew by colonisation from a larger settlement, and was originally an outlying farm dependent on a nearby village. In the modern idiom there are a number of variant forms of the surname, ranging from Thorpe, Thorp, Tharp and Turp, to Thro(u)p, Thrupp and Thripp

• Sir Thomas Edward Thorpe (1845 – 1925) - was a British chemist. From 1894 to 1909 he was Chief Chemist to the British Government, as Director of the Government Laboratory.
• William Homan Thorpe (1902 – 1986) - was Professor of Animal Ethology at the University of Cambridge, and a significant British zoologist, ethologist and ornithologist. Together with Nikolaas Tinbergen, Patrick Bateson and Robert Hinde, Thorpe contributed to the growth and acceptance of behavioural biology in Great Britain.
• John Jeremy Thorpe (1929 – 2014) - was a British politician who served as the Member of Parliament for North Devon from 1959 to 1979, and as leader of the Liberal Party from 1967 to 1976.
• Ethel Lily May Thorpe - (1908 – 2001) - was a British-Canadian nurse during World War II, she served as a nursing sister for the British army. After the war, Thorpe was appointed Matron of the County Hospital at Shanghai, China. She later traveled to Jamaica where she established a training program for psychiatric nurses. By 1950, she was appointed Matron of Bellevue Hospital, Jamaica. Thorpe also sat on the General Nursing Council of Jamaica

In 1881 there were 11,865 incidents of the Thorpe name across England, Scotland, Wales, Guernsey and Jersey.
It is also the 7,364^th most frequently occurring last name world-wide.

The area that held the most Thorpe families was the United Kingdom in 1891, particularly in Yorkshire with a 3242 families living at the time although this is only 25% of the actual population existing at the time, Yorkshire continues to hold the highest amount of Thorpe families in the UK.