As a child I was given the name McQuay and believed that everyone in the country with the name was related to me! Any time we were away from our home town I searched telephone directories (this was pre-internet) and this seemed to confirm that it was indeed a rare surname.
With a strong desire to collect and organise information (which later defined my career), I questioned each of my relatives about their full name, date of birth, marriage, and their other family members. Letters were posted to people whom I could not visit in person, with questions written out to explain the information I was requesting, spaces for their replies to be filled in and a stamped, self-addressed return envelope.
All the gathered facts were carefully recorded onto hand-drawn charts and trees. Where necessary, multiple pages were joined by sticky tape to provide a large enough space for everyone. One rather ambitious sheet of A4 paper was entitled "Total Ancestry Research" and had spaces labelled ready for myself, two parents, four grand-parents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents and thirty-two great-great-great-grandparents.
However, out of those sixty-three spaces on that chart, only six of them, tracking up the paternal line in each generation, would be expected to have my surname. The choice before me was whether to concentrate on a One-Name Study for McQuay to try to link up everyone I could find with that name, or to travel back through time and attempt to learn about each one of my direct ancestors, with their range of surnames.
A cousin on my mother's side had traced our shared ancestors so I thankfully copied that information and all at once filled in half of the pedigree chart. That left me looking at my father's side for an opportunity to do some research of my own. His grandfather McQuay had married a woman with the surname Brown. Prejudiced towards my lovely, rare surname I assumed that tracing the McQuay family members would be so much easier than the much more frequently occurring name Brown. I was so wrong ... but we will return to the Brown family on another day.
My early notes state that my great-grandfather's name was "Albert William (Harold) McQuay". Someone had mentioned to me that the names may possibly be in another order. I did meticulously write up that comment in my notebook although not who told me. However, inexperienced as I was, I did not understand that when parents give their child a name that is not the end of the story.