I have been dabbling in genealogy for a while. My dad traced our family back to one village in Suffolk, working from original parish records back in the 1970s. With the advent of the internet and online document repositories, he has been able to add more detail, confirm or correct relationships and add branches to his tree.
Meanwhile I have been helping out here and there. While investigating some births I discovered an intriguing link to New England for the family. While ‘our’ Southgates stayed in Suffolk and were mostly agricultural labourers, with the occasional publican, the Massachussetts Southgates ended up in all sorts of exciting places – featuring in history books, associating with people I had heard of! and getting Mountains named after them.
In addition we discovered that a number of the Southgates in England were Norfolk Southgates – it was a running joke in our family that whenever Gareth Southgate failed to produce in an England soccer match he must definitely be a Norfolk Southgate rather than one of ‘ours’ (he isn’t – his family are from Suffolk after all). I became intrigued to discover whether or not there was a link between the two families. Both are traceable in the counties back to the 1500s or earlier, but is the name unusual enough to make two separate occurrences likely?
Writing this, it is clear that my researching was leading me towards a one name study. I just kept finding interesting families that did not fit anywhere in my tree, the only common factor being the name. Once we were in lockdown in the UK, and access to the main genealogical sites were free to use over much of the summer in 2020 I started seriously collecting Southgates – identifying and tracking those in the 1851 UK census, the 1850 US census, wills and probate …
This website aims to be of use to researchers by elucidating relationships between Southgates and other families, by creating an overall picture of the distribution and nature of the Southgates in the UK, the US, and the few that are found elsewhere in the world, and by presenting narratives that will hopefully be of interest, while enabling me to pursue my love of historical research.
This is very much a work in progress, both as a study and as a website, so please excuse the mess …