When a couple has been married 25 years, they may receive gifts made of silver. After 50 years, they celebrate their golden anniversary.
But what do you give someone celebrating their 40th anniversary? A ruby.
What do you give a non-profit organization marking its 40th? A Ruby.
A team of about 30 Guild of One-Name Studies members developed a unique project to honour the guild’s 40th anniversary in September 2019. It was one that only they could do.
The team created a website devoted entirely to the study of one surname — Ruby.
When first looking into the Ruby surname, the team discovered it has multinational origins that include French, German, Hungarian, Russian, and Irish. Despite the possibility of various spellings, they decided right from the start to focus solely on the Ruby spelling. Perhaps later, they will include other spellings.
They said, “It is always a good strategy to undertake a one-name study in manageable chunks and restricting to Ruby in the initial stage is our way of doing so.”
The team explained in its Ruby blog how to start a one-name study. “(It) begins with collection of people, using Census records or Census substitutes in countries without a Census; birth, marriage and death information (BMDs); and depending on the country or the surname, other data sets that start to create sufficient data to analyse patterns related to your study goals.”
Thanks to help from researchers into the name, the project team has been able to make rapid progress to launch the site well ahead of time. Work is underway to add records from Australia, Denmark, England, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, Switzerland, Canada, and the United States.
If you have Rubys in your family, the Ruby One-Name Study would like you to contact them.
Thank you, Gail. We greatly appreciate the publicity. If anyone reading this has a Ruby in their family, or knows a Ruby family, please have them get in touch. with the buttons at the base of our home page.
Worth noting too that our Ruby site is just one of 200 One-Name Studies being preserved by the Guild. Even if we stop work tomorrow, which we won’t, what we have already done will be maintained by the Guild.