We love a good genealogical mystery. Here’s one that comes from Illinois, searching the Ontario collections, guest blogger Emily Bayma Santos, MLIS.

If you happened to ask most researchers how they came to their projects and experiments, they could most likely give you a straightforward answer. They perhapshad a single thought, a what-if moment, that drove them to push boundaries and learn a little bit more. They could be expanding on a previous line of inquiry. They were, possibly, just bored and it sounded fun. Sometimes, it’s all three, and that is how I became the principal investigator of the Carew One Name Study, registered with the Guild of One-Name Studies.

A one-name study, alternatively called a surname study, differs from traditional genealogy in that it researches the name itself. It can and does cross multiple family lines and continents. Such a study tracks not only the distribution of the surname (locations where the surname is concentrated) but can also attempt to reconstruct as many family lines as possible or identify a single origin location for the name. When I first started to seriously research my family about fifteen years ago, I had no idea people even did that, but I came to it the same way my predecessor did: trying to get
over a genealogical brick wall through any means possible.

The original Carew One Name Study was begun by a woman named Joan A. Carew Richardson in the early 1970s and continued up until her retirement in the early 2010s. She regrettably passed away before I had the chance to speak to her myself, but when I re-registered the study in 2024 I received the bulk of her materials. For her, she wanted to find out where her Carew forename came from, and she traced it back to the family of her 2nd great grandmother, whose name was Eliza Carew. When she couldn’t make any further headway, she began casting a wider net and indexing any Carew individuals she came across. In time, she had amassed an enormous collection of people and
pedigrees, registered her study, and assisted people worldwide with their own Carew
families—but she never was able to trace hers any further. At last count, it totalled over
eight thousand individuals organized into over a hundred family trees, enriched by
parish registers, newspaper articles, and vital records. This material was donated to the
Guild of One Name Studies, who digitized and preserved it so that the study could be
continued later.

For me, the road started with Madeline Carew Immel, my second great grandmother,
but it’s my eighth great grandfather who became the brick wall. When I couldn’t document his parentage, I began to look at contemporary Carew families he could conceivably belong to, and before long I had my own stack of family lines and individuals all linked by the name Carew. A fellow Carew researcher suggested that I look at the Guild of One Name Studies, and I took over the study started by Mrs. Richardson.

Even though Mrs. Richardson began Carew lines on five different continents, there’s still more to learn, and recent advances in digitization have really opened doors in those genealogical brick walls. With the help of the Ontario Community Newspapers search site , I have documented Carew families in Peterborough, St. Catharines, Lindsay, and Cobourg (a simple search for “Carew” brings back 3100 records, including full text news like the contemporary example on the left, plus photos, military records, and BMDs). The Peterborough and St. Catharines families have a common ancestor in Ireland, but I have not yet found a link with the Lindsay and Cobourg families. Chances are, they came from Ireland in the 1850s, as many families did, but which county?

Carew families can be found in Wexford, Waterford, Tipperary, and Cork during the 1850s. There were also families in just about every county in England as well as Spain and France. How closely are they related to the families in Peterborough and St. Catharines?

Until we can tell for sure, we’ll start by reading the newspapers, taking notes, and
building the trees one puzzle piece—or one click—at a time.

Emily Bayma Santos is a librarian and genealogist in Illinois conducting the Carew One
Name Study. You can find her on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/eabayma/