Name: AP One-Name Studies – Surname Study & Distribution Maps
Author: ancestorpress

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.

More from AncestorPress

AP One-Name Studies is one of a small family of AncestorPress tools for publishing family history research. Each works on its own, and all are free on WordPress.org:

AP Family Trees – publish beautiful, interactive family trees: charts and member profiles on any page. Shares its data core with One-Name Studies – reconstitute families from your study and publish them through Family Trees from the very same data, with no re-entry and no export/import round-trip.
AP Family Archive – publish your family history as a complete website: a person page for every ancestor, family group pages, a surname index and full search, with living people protected automatically.
AP Family Research – the private workbench behind the published tree: capture certificates, photos and notes as artefacts, work your research questions, and log every search, including the ones that found nothing. Nothing it holds is ever published; a proven conclusion is promoted into the shared data core with its citations attached.
AP One-Place Studies – give a one-place study a home on your own site: the records of a parish, village, street or house as a searchable occurrence index, place and household pages, and full export.

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 – GPLv3. 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.

External services

Freemius

Purpose: optional account connection, licence administration, checkout for the Pro edition and usage diagnostics, provided by Freemius, Inc. This free package is updated from WordPress.org.

When: only if you opt in, connect or manage an account or licence, use checkout, or consent to diagnostics. If you skip the opt-in, everything in the free edition still works.

Data: the site address, the administrator email you provide, plugin and WordPress versions and licence identifiers; usage diagnostics only with consent. Your study data is never sent.

Terms: https://freemius.com/terms/
Privacy: https://freemius.com/privacy/

AncestorPress Support Service

Purpose: the optional Help assistant, the AncestorPress Support Copilot, answers questions about using the plugin. Where an AI provider is connected in WordPress (Settings > Connectors), that provider answers first, at your own cost, and the AncestorPress Support Service, provided by Black and White Trading Ltd, supplies the matching documentation; if that provider cannot answer and the site is connected to the service, the assistant automatically falls back to the service. Where none is connected, the service answers a few questions a month itself, free. The assistant is read-only.

When: nothing is sent until an administrator opens the assistant and accepts its privacy notice. The acceptance is recorded with who gave it and when, and can be withdrawn on the Support screen.

Answered by your own AI provider: your question and chat history go only to that provider. The service is asked only for documentation, and receives the site address, the plugin and its version, the admin screen, and any Freemius installation ID or support token – never your question.

Answered by the service (no AI provider connected, or your AI provider’s answer failed – in either case only when the site is connected through the Freemius opt-in or a support token on the Support screen): the question and up to 20 recent chat messages; the site address and any Freemius installation ID or support token, to authorise the request; this plugin’s version, the versions of other active plugins whose folders begin “ap-” or “ancp-“, the admin screen, and your database version, the core library version, and how many studies and surname variants you have – never their contents. Your study data is never sent: no surname, variant, person, family, event, source or record leaves your site, only the counts. The free plan answers a limited number of questions a month.

Tickets: with a licence or support token, only when you open the ticket form and click “Create ticket” does the plugin also send the conversation, the details above, the question category, the contact email you enter (pre-filled with your WordPress account email) and the first and last name from your WordPress profile; these are kept as a support ticket. On the free plan no ticket form is offered, so none of this is sent, and help from a person is on the WordPress.org support forum.

Retention: questions are not stored, and the conversation stays in your browser until you leave the page. Authorisation checks are cached for up to 12 hours; rate-limit and free-plan counters are kept against a hash of your host name (monthly counts for about 40 days); daily usage counters with no site identifier are kept for up to 180 days. Please do not paste details of living people into a question.

Terms: https://ancestorpress.com/terms/
Privacy: https://ancestorpress.com/privacy-policy/