The Guild of One-Name Studies (GOONS) is a worldwide centre of excellence in one-name studies and promotes the interests of both the individuals and groups who are engaged in them. It enables researchers to act as focal points for particular names, which massively helps with the gathering of family history data.

We manage the Watson one-name study, and have amassed a lot of data over the years which we are in the process of uploading to the database on this site.

You can access the database by using the search function on the home page, with more specific searches available by using the advanced search function.

The Guild of One-Name Studies runs a Newswatch initiative, through which participating members send scans or transcriptions of newspaper clippings through to the focal points for names that appear therein. This is generally birth/marriage/death (BMD) data, and that is the bulk of what we upload to the database. If you are reading your local paper and you happen across Watson BMD information, or maybe find an article about an interesting Watson, feel free to contact us as we will be happy to receive it!

One of our commitments as a member of GOONS is to make the data we receive publicly available, and that is the aim of this website. The more data we receive, the more useful this site will be to those researching their own family history, so please send us anything you have!

If you're researching your own Watson ancestry, or even if you only know the names of your parents and grandparents, and you want to be part of the project, send your details to us and we'll add them to the database. Our policy is that we will not add details of living people unless specifically asked to, and we are happy to remove or anonymise details for recent ancestors as requested, so feel free to send us everything you have and to let us know what you are and aren't happy for us to publish.

If you are just starting out in your family research and need some help, we'd love to hear from you, as we have various experts who are adept at working with the various online tools to track down past relatives, and are generally happy to help out, time permitting - just be warned that our to-do list is fairly extensive and growing by the week!