A study of all those who have had the surname Goatham or Gotham, or variants of these, whether by birth or marriage or otherwise: their lives, where they fit on trees and the possible origins of the name.

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In January 2014 I become a GOON (i.e. joined the Guild of One Name Studies) and registered the name Goatham and the variant Gotham.

I will be adding more here soon about:

• what data I already have
• my plans for collecting more
• about the help I’d particularly appreciate

Please look back, or if you can’t wait please feel free to contact me.

I am adding the Go(a)tham One Name Study (ONS) pages as part of the website that also contains my family history, Goathams and others. I hope this doesn’t make things too confusing. I am adding a sub-section for the ONS; I will be adding the menu properly soon, but here is what I plan for it at the moment (the links show which pages currently exist):

Home	History	The trees	Research
About this study	– Origins and locations	Trees	Plans and priorities
Aims of the study and website	names and variants	Caveats	DNA study
	England	Tips	John-the-emigrant – origins?
Why am I doing this?	by name?	Branches	Difficulty with the sp. ‘Gotham’
Benefit from this site	Devon		Sources
	Kent
Get involved	Lancashire
FAQs	London
My ONS Blog	Shropshire / Staffordshire	Gazeteer	Data and media:
Administration	‘strays’		BMDs / CMBs
Copyright notice	Overseas: Emigrants		Wills
Acknowledgements	Australia	Odds and ends	Equity Court cases
Technical	New Zealand	Virtual museum	(others to be added)
The tree (using TNG)	South Africa	Not really Gothams
The other pages (using WordPress)	United States	Interesting relations
	Topics (across the centuries):
	Recent origins
	used as a middle name
	used in double-barrelled names

To search for people you can use the search in the sidebar, or go to the advanced search and other search pages for more options (see ‘find’ in the main menu).

In the tree:

Please note: everyone is now being added to one ‘tree’ in the software, even though it is clear that the name has more than one origin – a change to my previous policy.

This may sound perverse, but there is a good reason, and that is the difficulty of knowing which branches are linked and which aren’t. Since the tree is included in the url of the ‘people pages’ they would all break if separate trees were combined, or a joint tree split.

Almost everyone is assigned to a branch; in most cases people are in a branch with those to whom there is a known or likely relationship which can be shown, although a few ‘pseudo trees’ group together those for whom there is no known link.

I am using the spelling Goatham for the Kent lot, Gotham for most of the others, as this is how they seem to have ended up, and I’m using Gottam where and only at the time that this seems to have been the norm in Shropshire. Sources do or will show what spelling was used in original documents, or the copies or transcriptions when that is all that is available. On the advanced search page you can select either the soundex or metaphone last name option to view all at once.

Last updated: 2 May, 2021