When I started my one name study some years ago, I did not have much information on what I might find and where I would need to go to research Sarginson’s and their many variant and deviant surnames. Along the way I discovered that it not only was it not always spelt consistently but that it could be transcribed erroneously to make records even harder to find. I soon got into using wild cards to help with my searching. Another key consideration for me was that I did not want to just collect records but to relate them to families and try to reconstruct them. I wanted also to start to understand their stories. This led to me creating this more blog focused website than go down a different route of using technology to display family trees.

In more recent times I have had less time to spend on my study as I am now involved in several other research projects as well as researching my husband and my own family’s history. This is the year when I intend to archive my study and make it accessible through the Guild of One Name Studies where it has been registered.

I am still updating my trees so that they can be archived and have managed to start the New Year by creating two new embryonic ones. A search for one of my own ancestors using wild cards in the surname found a record for a Matthew Saggerson in York Castle prison for an offence committed in Leeds. A report in the Leeds Intelligencer of 13 Mar 1847 provided the details of the assault he had committed with another man, Robert Sharp, on John Calvert near the Clarendon Inn, Victoria Rd, Leeds. Matthew and Robert “threw him to the ground” and stole two shillings from him. For this they were both sentenced to hard labour for one year.

Another search found a family of Segerson/Sigerson’s in County Kerry, Ireland. It is not clear how the surname has been derived. The 2016 Oxford Dictionary of Family Names for Britain and Ireland does not contain Sag(g)erson, Seg(g)erson or Sigerson. It does have Sager, Seger and Siger but these surnames were only found in small numbers in the 1881 census. I will continue to investigate these two families, particularly as I have several Irish soldiers with unusual surname variants who appear in the North West of England in the mid-19^th century. There are also some 18^th century records, mostly wills, for the Segerson’s in Ireland for me to follow up.

Do let me know if you would like to collaborate or indeed takeover my study.