AP One-Name Studies

Keep your one-name study on your own WordPress site – self-hosted, with your data in your own database rather than locked inside a third-party genealogy platform. AP One-Name Studies is built for registered one-name studies: manage surname variants and deviants to Guild of One-Name Studies definitions, index every occurrence of the name wherever it is found, map its distribution across the historic counties of Britain and Ireland, and publish it all as searchable pages on your own site – without needing TNG or any external service.

Your data lives in your own WordPress database and can always be exported in full as CSV. No lock-in, ever – a study should outlive its author, and it only can if the data is truly yours.

Built by AncestorPress – tools for family history, built to last.

What You Can Do With the Free Version

• A dedicated home for your study – one registered surname per site, with its spellings, occurrence index, maps and public pages all in one place
• Variants and deviants to Guild definitions – variants are registered and grouped under the study surname; deviants (one-off clerical errors) are held on file without polluting the canonical spelling family
• Occurrence entry built for record-taking – context fields stick between entries, the cursor returns to the name field, Enter saves; dates like “Q3 1861”, “abt 1790” and “1751/52” are understood, and anything unreadable is stored exactly as written
• CSV import with column matching – upload your spreadsheet and point each column at a study field; FreeBMD and census layouts are recognised automatically; census facts (age, occupation, relation, condition, birthplace) land in their own fields; values are stored verbatim and nothing is ever merged or overwritten
• Save your own import templates – your workbook’s column matching remembered by heading, so next quarter’s import is a single click
• Every import is undoable – each import is kept as a record set, so a wrong file or wrong matching can be removed as a whole without touching anything else
• Public study pages in one click – homepage, registered spellings, a searchable paginated occurrence index and a contact form, created as draft pages ready for you to review and publish
• Distribution analysis – occurrences by place and period, plus a choropleth map of the historic counties of the UK and Ireland (the boundaries GRO-era records were kept in, keyed by Chapman code)
• Privacy that fails closed – nothing shows until you switch the study public; private entries and anything linked to a living person are never displayed
• Complete CSV export – every field of every occurrence, including your as-recorded originals, plus the spelling register
• Archive export for preservation and handover – one ZIP holding the whole study as documented JSON plus flat CSVs and a plain-English README, built so your study outlives you and your platform
• GEDCOM export of the study’s reconstructed people – a standard GEDCOM file, at full fidelity, that opens in Family Historian, Legacy, RootsMagic, TNG and any genealogy application. Your data is never locked in
• Three display styles – Heritage (matches AP Family Trees), Modern, or hand the styling entirely to your own theme

Pro

Add the worldwide picture:

• The worldwide distribution map – the name’s emigration story by country, with your UK and Ireland county work rolled up automatically
• Coming to Pro: distribution over time (census and GRO period presets), Guild register-ready study reports, the reconstitution workbench, and record-collection backing

This free plugin is the complete home of a one-name study: a single registered surname with its spellings, occurrence index, maps and public pages. All current editions manage one surname study per WordPress site. The Pro version (the worldwide distribution map) is obtained from ancestorpress.com and installed as the paid build of the plugin – its code is not part of this free package.

Who It Is For

AP One-Name Studies is designed for:

• Registered one-namers who want their study published on their own site, in their own hands, rather than on a shared platform
• Guild of One-Name Studies members who follow the variant and deviant conventions and need them respected exactly
• Family history societies presenting a surname study in a structured, public, professional format
• Anyone tracking a surname across records who has outgrown a spreadsheet and wants a proper occurrence index, distribution maps and public pages

What Makes It Different

Most genealogy plugins publish a family tree. A one-name study is a different shape of work: it collects every occurrence of a surname wherever it appears – not one lineage but the whole spread of a name – and asks where and when it occurs. AP One-Name Studies is built for that shape. It keeps your spellings to Guild definitions, indexes occurrences without ever rewriting your originals, and maps distribution by the historic counties records were actually kept in.

Your data stays on your server, stored in your own WordPress database – not uploaded to an external genealogy platform or locked behind someone else’s service. And because it shares a data core with AP Family Trees, the families you reconstitute from a study can be published through the tree plugin too.

Works with AP Family Trees

AP One-Name Studies is part of the AncestorPress suite and shares its data core with AP Family Trees – our free plugin for publishing beautiful, interactive family trees on WordPress. Reconstitute families from your one-name study and publish them as charts and profile pages through AP Family Trees, from the very same data, with no re-entry and no export/import round-trip. If you publish family history on WordPress, the two are built to work side by side.

Get AP Family Trees free from the WordPress.org plugin directory: https://wordpress.org/plugins/ap-family-trees/

Help us get it right – one-namers, we are listening

AP One-Name Studies is brand new. We have built it with care and with respect for the discipline, but we are software makers first, not career one-namers – and one-name study is a deep field with conventions and niches we may not have caught. If we have missed something that matters to your study, we would genuinely rather hear it than not.

Tell us what a one-name study needs, flag anything that works against Guild practice, and suggest features on our Future Direction page: https://www.ancestorpress.com/ap-one-name-studies-wordpress-plugin/future-direction/ – it has a short, open suggestions form and shows where we are looking next. Every idea from a working one-namer is read and weighed. (For troubleshooting, please use the WordPress.org support forum.)

Maps and data

The county and country maps use openly licensed boundary data. UK county boundaries come from the Historic County Borders Project; Irish county and world country boundaries are derived from Natural Earth (public domain). These are the historic geographies GRO-era records were kept in, keyed by Chapman code – not modern administrative boundaries.

Third-party libraries

This plugin bundles the following open-source libraries. All are GPL-compatible.

• php-gedcom by Kristopher Wilson – MIT licence. A namespaced GEDCOM library bundled with the shared AncestorPress Core, used by the suite’s GEDCOM import/export services.
• Freemius WordPress SDK by Freemius – MIT licence. Used for licence management on the Pro plan.

Privacy and data

This plugin does not collect or transmit any personal data from your site or your visitors to us. All study data is stored exclusively in your own WordPress database. The optional public contact form emails enquiries to the study contact address you set, and nowhere else.

This plugin bundles the Freemius SDK for licensing and update management. What it does, and when:

• On activation Freemius may show a one-time opt-in screen. Opting in sends basic environment and account information – your site URL, WordPress and PHP versions, and the email address you enter – to Freemius so it can provide update notices and support. This opt-in is optional: click Skip and the plugin stays fully functional; nothing is transmitted, and no licence activation is required to use the free plugin.
• If you buy and activate a Pro licence the SDK contacts Freemius to validate the licence and deliver Pro updates.
• Your study data and your visitors’ data are never sent to Freemius.

Freemius’s terms and privacy policy: Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.