Project history

In September 2014 the Guild Committee approved in principle a project to host members’ one-name study websites. A major purpose of this Guild Members’ Websites Project is to enable the website of each participating member to continue indefinitely as a publicly accessible website after the member has died or ceased to be a member of the Guild. In November 2014 the Committee gave full support to a detailed plan.

The proposal was framed and the detailed plans were drawn up by a team of members consisting of Jim Benedict, Marie Byatt, Paul Featherstone, Chris Gray, Debbie Kennett and Paul Millington, led at that time by Mike Spathaky. The Members’ Websites Project team (now augmented and with Paul Featherstone as Project Leader) believes that it is a ground-breaking project for the Guild and goes to the heart of the objectives of the Guild Constitution which are “to advance the education of the public in one-name studies,… to promote the preservation and publication of the resultant data, and to maximize its accessibility to interested members of the public.”

After a successful pilot project, involving a few websites of different types, the Members’ Websites Team invited all Guild members to join a full-scale Trial Project and to create a website or copy an existing site to the new facility.

The Trial Stage was due to last until November 2016. At all stages the systems were tested and found to be robust. There is a strong team of volunteer Guild members who provide administrative support and guidance to participants. The Team recommended, and the Committee agreed, that it had already achieved its targets by February 2016 and the full Project could be launched from 1st April 2016.

The Guild commitment to the Project into the future is now confirmed and the Guild will preserve members’ websites indefinitely as far as it is able to.

About 150 one-name study websites are up and running on the Project (as at May 2017). These can be viewed via the Members’ Websites List.