Introduction to the Orlando One Name Study

The One Name Study for the name of ORLANDO, which is registered with the Guild of One Name Studies, commenced in February 2002, focusing on my Italian Ancestry, by the time I had finally decided to register the One Name Study I had been researching my family history for 16 years. In 1986 I started researching my maternal line then, in 1993 the lines of my husband.

If fate had played a very different hand my maiden name would have been Orlando, and many of the questions that I have about the name and my Italian ancestry would indeed have been answered, and as genealogists know, only too well, what seems impossible, has a certain charm about it, and generally results in many, many hours of research.

The name ORLANDO is an Italian name, my own researches focuses on Sicily, but nevertheless, material about the origins of the name, is short supply and is linked to the name of Roland. Try putting the name ORLANDO into a search engine, I used Google, and once you have discarded the many sites about a holiday in Orlando Florida, there are some interesting sites and further lines of enquiry.

The Guild of One Name Studies expects a researcher, who has registered a specific name to extract the GRO References and collate the certificates accordingly. I had barely started this task, then I became aware of numerous references to the name Orlando, on the “super-highway”. You know how it is, you see a web link to a database or suchlike online and you “have” to just have a quick look to see! well, I looked and was amazed at the amount of Orlando.

References that pertained to the USA, Canada and Australia. As web sites come and go, I decided to extract all the encountered references and record them along with the web address of where they were located. ALL these of course need to be verified against the original documentation ~ remember, the Internet is a useful source, a finding aid, it is valuable in its own way, but nothing will replace the thrill of actually seeing the original document.

The criteria for the Orlando one name study are set out on the One Name Study home page. It lists the criteria based upon the study researching the name in the United Kingdom. Clearly, the amount of Orlando reference within the UK will be less than in Italy, after all, this is an Italian name. The reference to Overseas Material is where everything, non-UK will appear. There are obviously going to be amendments to this, as the study is still in it’s infancy, despite being 11 years old!

One of the initial things that made me decide to research the name more fully was stumbling across a marriage reference in Woking Surrey in 1901 of an Orlando, nothing odd in that, except that my own branch of the Orlando’s did not arrive in the area until sixty years later, or did they?

Every study has a catalyst and this was mine, and therefore the One Name Study was formed as I sought to locate, collect and index every reference to the name regardless of its geographical location or its source.