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Surname Origins

What's in a name?

The sources from which our names are derived are almost endless: nicknames, physical attributes, counties, trades, heraldic charges, and almost every object known to mankind.

When communities were small each person was identifiable by a single personal name or nickname, but as the population increased it gradually became necessary to identify people further - leading to names such as Henry the baker, John the long, Giles from Sutton, Ann of the hill, Henry son of William.

It was the Norman barons who introduced the concept of surnames into England, and then the practice gradually spread. So trades, nicknames, places of origin, and fathers' names became fixed surnames - names such as Fletcher, Redhead, Green, Wilkins and Johnson. Initially, these names were changed or dropped at will, but eventually they began to stick and to get passed on. By 1400 most English families, and those from Lowland Scotland, had adopted the use of these hereditary surnames.

New surnames continued to be formed long after 1400, and immigrants brought in new ones. Many Irish and Highland Scottish names derive from Gaelic personal names, as do those of the Welsh, who only began to adopt the English system of surnames following the union of the two countries in 1536.

The study of surnames is obviously vital to the process of ancestor tracing. However, it is easy to place excessive importance on the family surname, in the belief that knowing its meaning or origin may help in some way in tracing your family tree. This is all happened too far back to be helpful in researching family origins, although the study of a particular surname may be useful when the investigation points to an area where it appears often. So you can see that only by tracing a particular family line, possibly back to the fourteenth century or beyond, will you discover which version of a surname is yours. It may be interesting to know that your surname may be derived from a place, such as Lancaster, for example, or an occupation, such as Weaver, but this is not necessarily of relevance to your family history.

Where a study of a particular surname may be of benefit in family history research is when investigation into the distribution of a name points to an area of the country or a county where it is particularly dense. Many have changed their names or adopted an alias at some time in the past, possibly for some legal reason, such as complying with a request in a will, or simply because the new name was preferred to the old one.

Masses have been written about the meanings of surnames and your local library will have several volumes, some quite weighty, to put you on the right track. Names are a great thing to 'Google' too and this can be a very rewarding approach. There are several specialist websites covering the subject, almost certainly these will cover most of the names in which you are interested.

Only by tracing a particular family line will you discover which version of a name is yours. It is more important to be aware that both surnames and forenames are subject to variations in spelling, and not only in the distant past. Standardised spelling did not really arrive until the nineteenth century, and even in the present day variations occur, often its by accident through administrative errors - how much of your past has your name spelt correctly, for example?


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