Introduction

Since the mid-1980s, I have noted down miscellaneous references I found to my surname, Piggin. This evolved into what family historians call a one-name study: a semi-scholarly survey of where a name comes from and who uses it now. By the late 1990s, I had put the collected information on the internet, since there always seem to be nuggets in here that people are interested in. The research is registered with the Guild of One-Name Studies.

There is no suggestion that all the people listed on All the Piggins are blood relatives: they are included because of the surname they use. On All the Piggins you will find people named Piggin, Piggins, Piggon, Peggin and even more variants, extending to:

• people whose surnames are Piggin by both male and female descent;
• people who include Piggin at first or second position in a double-barrelled surname;
• people who have Piggin as a first or middle name;
• people of either sex who acquired the Piggin surname by servitude (slavery), deed poll, marriage or adoption;
• corporations which have Piggin as part of their name;
• fictional people given the name Piggin by novelists;
• real people who assume the name Piggin as a stage name, screen name, ring name, pen name or nom de plume or nom de guerre, or any other pseudonym.

This website is not intended to be read like a book, but rather to be explored like a shop. You can check out what the word piggin means and consider how it also came to be a surname and even a placename. Or you can read a biography or two. Some visitors are interested in Piggins as a brand of automobile or clock, and those products are described. The navigation panel at left should be enough to guide you to the deeper recesses, but there is also a site-map if you want to get an overview of everything here.

Finally there are sections for the hard-core genealogists: indexes of vital records and draft family trees. You won't find any gedcom files to load into family tree programs here, because we Piggins have not done much of that kind of mechanical ancestor hunting. Family-tree software nurtures an illusion of certainty about the past, whereas the simple descendancy charts you will find on this site are nothing more than attempts to heap up information in the area and era where it might belong and leave the reader to contemplate whether the suggested pattern makes sense.

Many readers write in to suggest better ways of arranging this data, and that is because they too understand that this is open scholarship and always just an approximation of the truth. On privacy grounds, I never publish family trees of living people.

If you want to keep up with the newest findings, follow the Facebook Piggin "wall" at the web address facebook.com/piggin.