A Lovely look back at speaker’s family name

AT their May meeting, Hinckley Family History Society heard from speaker Geoff Giles about his researches into “Several Lovely Families”.

Geoff explained that he has been a member of the Guild Of One Name Studies (GOONS) for almost twenty years.

Starting out doing his own family history research, he discovered his grandmother’s maiden name to be ‘Lovely’ – and that’s where it all started.

Geoff revealed how he found connections back to Sleaford and from there developed his passion for recording all instances of the surname ‘Lovely’ that he could locate.

This quickly led him from Lincolnshire up to Yorkshire and across into Leicestershire.

The ongoing puzzle is to try to determine how all of these isolated groups of ‘Lovelies’ link together.

Members of the group heard how Geoff has traced ‘Lovely’ occurrences back as far as 1317 and has kept his personal research to the UK.

However, he has found a contact in Canada who has discovered links back to Geoff’s great-great-grandfather’s brother.

Apparently, emigration to Canada happened around 1870 when he sold his business in England.

However, it also transpired that he left his wife and children behind and subsequently married again out in Canada.

Happily, his wife in England built a happy life with a new partner, and Geoff has been in contact with their descendants.

Similarly, other contacts have now appeared out in New Zealand, and Geoff explained how he was aiming to use DNA techniques to investigate these links further.

Geoff then explained a little about the development of surnames, especially in the 14th century when population growth made surnames necessary for tracing people in connection with taxes and inheritance.

The surname ‘Lovely’ seems to simply mean ‘an amiable, kind person’.

Geoff also spoke about the vast range of spelling variants that he has found along the way.

Other ‘Lovely’ characters Geoff told of included a Sherriff of the City of London, a film actor in the USA and an author who sailed to Australia on a clipper ship.

Finally, Geoff gave some advice on starting a One-Name Study.

Essential if doing this is to set the scope of your project before you start.

Think about the coverage and the data sources that you will need to use.

Then collect the data, analyse it and reconstruct the families and draw conclusions on distribution, migration and evolution.

Finally, you are encouraged to publish and share your research with others.

The Hinckley Family History Society will next meet for its annual ‘outing’.

This year the group will be having a tour of Hinckley Town Centre and learning about local personalities from popular local historian Greg Drozdz.

Members will meet at the Museum on June 7 at 7pm ready for a 7.30pm start.

For further details contact Hinckley 612261.