CLOSE one-name study

Ephraim CLOSE In the course of a one-name study one comes across a good many interesting characters, and in following up their stories one can also learn about the conditions and key issues of the times in which they lived.   The first thing that makes Ephraim CLOSE stand out is his relatively uncommon name.   The study has uncovered   just five people in England named Ephraim CLOSE from just two families, each well separated from the others by geography, age or both, making identification a good deal easier than it is for the hundreds of John, James, Elizabeth   or Mary   CLOSEs in the study.   Holy Cross, Avening geograph.co.uk https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/ Ephraim CLOSE was born in 1808 [2] was christened in Avening church, Gloucestershire, on 19 March 1808, the son of William CLOSE, the Avening parish clerk, and his wife Mary (formerly TRUMAN) [3] . Ephraim worked as a stone mason [4] , living for most of his life in...

Who was he? There are over 300 people named Robert CLOSE in my current one-name study database.   Little has been discovered about many of them apart from their family relationships and census records.   However, there are some for whom an interesting back-story has emerged, and one of these is the Robert CLOSE born in Bishopwearmouth, Sunderland, County Durham, England, in 1825.   He was christened on 24 February 1825 in Bishopwearmouth [1] , the son of Jobling CLOSE and his wife Rachel, formerly HODGE. On 25 May 1845, Robert was married in Monkwearmouth to Mary STUDHOLME [2] , whose family had moved to the area from Cumberland.   They appear on the 1851 census [3] together with their first child Mary (born 1847) [4] at 8 Walworth Street, Bishopwearmouth, where Robert is listed as a shipwright. Another five children were born to the family between 1850 and 1857, of which four died in infancy. The second surviving daughter was Elizabeth Ann, born 1855 [5...

The CLOSE one-name study has uncovered a number of interesting  and sometimes strange characters - and one of the quirkiest must be  John   'Poet' CLOSE. Thanks to his own published writings and various press reports and letters there is an abundance of information available about this individual, who even made it into the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, although his entry is less than complimentary. John CLOSE, the son of Jarvis CLOSE and Elizabeth (née HARKER) , was born at Dyke Heads in Swaledale on the estate of the Rt Hon Sir James PARKE (1) , and was baptised at Gunnerside Methodist Chapel on 11th August 1816.  His family moved to Crosby Garrett in 1819. Picture source: CLOSE, John,  The Book of the Chronicles  (1842), frontispiece From butcher's boy to poet  As John was growing up, he began to help his father in his business as a butcher and farmer....

The starting-points for my study of family history were a few pages in two family Bibles containing details of some ancestors I'd been told about, and a few unfamiliar names which needed further research in order to fit them into the family tree.  When the 1881 census became freely available online (remember that breakthrough moment?) I decided to collect all the CLOSEs in Lancashire in 1881 since it was becoming evident that although I had no siblings or 1st cousins, there were a good many CLOSEs more distantly related to me.   I made a couple of extended visits to the Lancashire record office and Manchester central library (over 200 miles from home) to trawl through other census years and parish registers on microfilm.  If I'd only waited another 15 years or so I could have found most of these images indexed and accessible from the comfort of my own home! Hindsight is a wonderful thing.😩 Soon I reluctantly had to expand my study of Lancashire CLOSEs beyond...