A True Test of Your Skills

Embarking on a One-Name Study in County Louth, Ireland

In February 2024, I built a WikiTree page for a One-Name Study of my surname - the Callan Name Study. Since then, I’ve been keeping an eye on that page, hoping someone else would find it and take an interest. As of 1 Jun 2025, it had 854 views… but no nibbles.

To be fair, other websites are tackling this same project with varying levels of success and activity. The Guild of One-Name Studies has a Callan project with about 50 names listed. And Stan Courtney, who manages the Callan DNA study on FTDNA, maintains a Callan - Earliest Known Ancestors database, both at that link and on Ancestry. Callan households in Louth gives a pretty cool overview of the available data.

No matter which way you approach a One-Name Study, there is going to be a lot of legwork, and I have been avoiding the problem of figuring out “where do I start?”

Until I had a long weekend over Memorial Day.

Finding an Entry Point

Recently, I wrote about Great-Uncle George and his research methods:

What Did George Know?

And in writing that, I recalled the newspaper item about our Callin cousin and fellow genealogist Dr. Fred B. Callin, who traveled to Ireland in 1907 to meet his cousins. I also saw mention that the first Callin Reunion in Bowling Green in 1906 featured the reading of a letter from cousins in Ireland.

I have reached out before to at least one Irish Genealogical Society, but I found one local to Louth, so I sent off an email introducing myself and asking whether they have any materials from a visiting American cousin in 1907. While I wait for them to respond, I decided to take some time and start canvassing County Louth around 1907.

There are two major Census years for Ireland in 1901 and 1911. I started by running a broad Ancestry search for the Callan/Callen/Callin surname and then filtering down to the 1911 census database. I knew from the “Callan households in Louth” page that there should be about 181 households to find. Which is good to know, because the only way I’ve found to start documenting them is to manually click through the records and add each one as a “new person” in my tree.

After the first 6 or 8 hours, I had a list of 50 households that I had added to a Google Sheet. I was just adding people to my “Callin Family History…” tree, and putting the links to their profiles into the Sheet. When I began, I was just recording names/DOB/Ancestry link, but I kept realizing I needed to add columns to differentiate everyone, and as I added columns, I had to go back over what I had already done to make sure I wasn’t missing anything.

It was at this point that I posted a Note:

But that was a good beginning.

Two Days Later…

I started with a single year in a single county because I wanted a baseline to work with. You don’t usually find duplicate individuals in a small area on one census, so I can be confident that each household I’m recording in Ancestry and on my Sheet is a unique set of individuals.

This shouldn’t be a surprise, but there are an astounding number of people sharing the same handful of given names: Joseph/James/Thomas/Patrick; Mary/Catherine/Bridge/Ann/Margaret. I’ll need to be extremely careful as I add other records to this baseline and attempt to figure out the genealogical relationships between them. I can’t just assume that a birth record matches based on the name and birth date, since the census dates are usually off by a couple of years. And I can’t assume a marriage record matches—especially for databases that include multiple marriages on one record without pairing the couples getting married!

Care to Join In?

I’ve made my Sheet a part of the Callan Name Study page, with some suggestions there for anyone who might want to join in the fun. (Anyone with this Callin One Name Study link should be able to view and comment.)

My hope is that even if someone isn’t interested specifically in the Callan family, they might be interested in poking around and trying their hand at improving WikiTree pages. Practice makes perfect! And if someone takes the time to transfer an Ancestry profile into a well-sourced WikiTree biography, that saves me all kinds of time.

But… I don’t pretend this is an easy task. Thus, the title of this post. You will get a crash course in the geography of County Louth, intimate familiarity with parish vital records, and risk over-exposure to people called “Bridget Callan.”

One Step At a Time

Because I’m just focusing on a narrow slice of time in one Irish County, this doesn’t feel quite so daunting. However, after gathering all this initial information and surveying what is already on WikiTree, I know there is a literal world left to explore.

As I put in the effort to find the connection to Ireland from my Ohio family, I can see hundreds of families like mine settled all over North America and Australia. It would take years of sustained effort to make sense of it all.

But that’s why I started small.