Writers on Surname History

There are three main aspects in the study of surnames:-

	Philology
	Local/Family History
	Cultural/Bio Anthropology

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Modern British Surname Studies

Influence of the Philologists

William Camden

The Elizabethan antiquary was the first to write about the history and development of English surnames in his 'Remains concerning Britain' He discerningly writes, in 1605,

"And as to find the true original of Surnames is full of difficulty, so it is not easie to search all the causes of alterations of Surnames"

There was a flowering of interest in the subject early in this century. I offer the differing opinions of McKinley and Leslie Dunkling as to whether these works still have relevance.

On the other hand:-

"These earlier works are now best left on one side by amateur historians or genealogists. Many of them at the time that they were written advanced the study of surnames and their history, but they have now been superceded by later books, and inevitably some of the views advanced in them have been shown to be inaccurate or incomplete by later research" (McKinley)

 

It was not till 1958 that an authoritative dictionary was published:-

PH Reaney 'A Dictionary of British Surnames' . This is still acknowledged as a work of major importance in this field.

"The dictionary covers the whole of Britain, though the treatment of English surnames is usually fuller than those of Wales or Scotland...This dictionary is a very useful work of reference...but it does have limitations. One of these is that a large number of surnames derived from place-names is not listed. Many of these were omitted to save space, and on the somewhat optimistic assumption that it would be easy to identify the places from which surnames were derived by using a gazetteer of place-names. (It) only deals with surnames which have survived to the present day, and does not deal with names which once existed, but are now extinct.. Early, usually mediaeval forms are given , and these are then linked to forms that exist today. (This method) is generally reliable, but there are instances (where the connection is doubtful). (Another limitation) is that the dictionary does not always list all the variant forms of a surname together. (Despite these limitations), Reaney's work remains a valuable source of reference." (from a review by Richard McKinley)

This omission of locative surnames was corrected in the posthumous 1991 edition, with the inclusion of some 4000 additional surnames. The title changed with the publication of the 3rd edition to 'A Dictionary of English Surnames' ; the change of title reflecting the growing change of emphasis away from surnames of Celtic origin. The dictionary has recently been issued in a revised third edition (1997) with an afterword by David Hey.

Basil Cottle's Penguin Dictionary of Surnames (1967) -new edition imminent- acknowledged and incorporated Guppy's work where he felt it appropriate. "It is a book easily used and understood by amateur genealogists without any specialised linguistic knowledge" (McKinley)

The Oxford University Press published 'A Dictionary of Surnames' in 1988. This dictionary -edited by Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges- is especially strong on European surnames. For me, its importance lies in the fact that it was the first dictionary to utilise a telephone directory survey as an tool to create a headlist of the 15,000 most frequent surnames in Britain and Ireland today.

Local Historians

Academic

The famous local historian -W.G. Hoskins- included a chapter on 'The Homes of Family Names' in his 'Local History in England' , first published 1959. He covered the extent of mobility of the population; telephone directory analysis; case-studies from Devon and Cornwall (including a distribution map for the name 'Williams' in that county).

Hoskins became the first professor of local history at Leicester University in 1965, and that postgraduate department's association with surname studies was consolidated with the establishment of the Marc Fitch Fellowship. This sponsorship allowed the launch in 1965 of a very important venture -The English Surnames Survey- under Richard McKinley. McKinley "brought not only a thorough technical expertise, but a wide general knowledge to bear on the interpretation of his material." (Hey). He published surveys of the surnames of the counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Oxford, Lancashire, and Sussex. David Postles is the current Marc Fitch Fellow, and has published studies of the surnames of Devon, Leicestershire and Rutland.

Further information on the English Surnames Survey

The English Surnames Survey is scholarly and authoritative. However it is necessarily selective. A telephone directory analysis of Kent and Sussex surnames that was published in Nomina, revealed that many Sussex habitation names are not discussed by McKinley, that only 10% of the surnames listed in McKinley's index were shown to have survived as modern surnames, particularly associated with Sussex. Moreover, many of the surnames discussed were not specific to Sussex, but were common and widespread in other regions as well.

The study of surname distribution has been made more accessible in the 1990's through the work of Professor David Hey at the University of Sheffield, where he was the Professor of Local and Family History. David Hey is a strong exponent of the existence of core families, and therefore surnames, loyal to a particular area over a long period of time. He has delivered lectures on the distinctive surnames of Hallamshire and Staffordshire. His seminal work -to date (1999)- is an article entitled 'The Local History of Family Names' in which he demonstrated that not just locative, but also that examples of every other category of English surname reveal distinctive historical regional signatures. Professor Hey bases his work on a database that he has created of the surnames in the GRO death registers for the 5 year period, 1842-1846.

David Hey also leads the Names Project team- whose work as a group of enthusiasts properly belongs to the next section.

To: Read
David Hey Family names and Family history (Hambledon & London, 2000)
David Hey "The Local History of Family Names." Local Historian 27, no. 4 (November 1997): i-xx.
David Hey "Family names and family history." History Today 51, no. 7(July 2001): 38-40.
David Hey "Recent advances in the study of surnames" The Historian 80, (Dec 2003)

George Redmonds, like David Hey, is an advocate of the 'new' multi-discliplinary approach. Dr Redmonds studied surnames to postgraduate level at Leicester University, and the main thrust of his work to date has concentrated on Yorkshire names. He was the first to suggest that many surviving topographic surnames may have a common origin- a viewpoint that appears to have been supported by the results of Sykes DNA study. Dr Redmonds particularly proposed in 1973 that the widespread surname Brooks emanated from the Huddersfield area, ramified greatly there, and migrated to other areas. This does seem to be borne out by the 1881 distribution of that name.

In 1997, Dr Redmonds produced his important 'Surnames and Genealogy: a new approach'. (republished: FFHS)
This was cogently reviewed in Nomina , as follows (in paraphrase).

"For the last forty years genealogists have relied on P.H. Reaney's Dictionary of British Surnames for accurate etymologies of modern family names..Reaney's method was to deduce origins of modern names from a random collection of Middle English bynames whose genealogical connections with the modern names had not been demonstrated. His etymologies took little account of the..contexts in which name forms occurred and largely ignored the linguistic transformations that took place in surnames between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries. By contrast, the underlying thesis of [this book] is that every family name has a particular origin and a unique history. Where Reaney's approach was general and narrowly linguistic, Redmonds 'new approach' is particular and multi-disciplinary, tracing the history and spellings of each name through precisely localised contexts...Here at last is a book that shows exactly how some modern surnames developed from their actual mediaeval originals."

To: Read
George Redmonds Names and History: People, places and things (Hambledon & London, 2004) - Chapters 2 and 3
George Redmonds Surnames and Genealogy: A new approach (New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1997)

The Enthusiasts

The first person to attempt a serious analysis of the geographical distribution of surnames was the naturalist, H B Guppy, who published his 'Homes of Family Names in Great Britain in 1890'. I have treated his contribution at more length on another page.

"Guppy's pioneering work was not taken up until recent times. Instead the study of the origins of surnames became the preserve of linguists who were concerned with the meaning of a name rather than with identifying its geographical origins and subsequent ramification" (Hey).

That tide began to inch back with the appearance of Francis Leeson's 1964 Genealogists' Magazine article 'The Study of Single Surnames and their distribution'. As far as I can ascertain, Leeson was the the first person to actually map the distribution of a name and its variants. He used methods now familar to produce a snapshot of the distribution of his name from the GRO indexes 1841-50, comparing these with the results from wills, parish registers and other records from the 16th century, and from a telephone directory analysis in 1961. The resulting distributions revealed that the various variants of Lee/Leeson to have different focii. In many ways, this was a paper 10-15 years ahead of its time. It received the following critique by Reaney:-

"Your method is useful, but its value is limited by concentrating on the modern distribution. For me, and for the original distribution , LEE,LEA, LEY, LAY and LEIGH are one surname. Theay all go back ultimately to the O(ld) E(nglish) leah...the different modern spellings may be partly die to ME [Middle English] grammar,, partly to the local dialect or simply to mere chance...Parish Registers did not begin until long after surnames became fixed; they are not necessarily proof of the original distribution."

I am including J D Porteous' 1982 article on 'Surname Geography' here, as although Professor Porteous is an academic geographer, his paper is obviously based on a personal enthusiam, and because it is of considerable relevance to the enthusiastic amateur. Professor Porteous took a family name -Mell- and applied the statistical methods of the geographer to a one-name study of that name. His article ought to be better-known and recognised.

"Surname geography deserves less neglect by geographers. It provides an effective connection between studies in regional and local history, genealogy and geography...It encourages cooperation between layman and academic".

Alas, it failed to stimulate other geographers, and it was left to amateur historians to continue the theme. (I cover his techniques in the section on one-name analysis)

The next ten years saw a flurry of articles in 'Local Historian'

• Brett -1985- 'Use of telephone directories in surname studies'
• Ecclestone-1989-'Diffusion of English surnames'
• Titterton- 1990-'Pinpointing the origin of a surname'

All this work consolidated and more fully developed in Colin Rogers' 1995 book 'The Surname Detective: investigating surname distribution in England, 1086-present day'

This book is an excellent starting point for the enthusiast - but is already in need of revision, due to the rapid development in the digitisation of historical resources since it was published. (I hope to cover it more fully in the section on analysis, one day).

For those who require a shorter introduction -Andrew Todd's 'Shadows of Ancestors : surnames and practical family history research', is a pithy discussion of many of the themes.

The same year 1996 saw the publication of
John and Sheila Rowlands 'The Surnames of Wales : for family historians and others' The Rowlands based their book on the findings of a survey of all marriages in Welsh parishes 1813-1837. (Please note that this was a statistical analysis; the collected data is of no use for individual genealogical research.) The Rowlands provide in-depth analysis of the distribution and incidence of hundreds of names associated with Wales.

Also published in the same year, another excellent book with a Welsh tinge, was Michael Williams' 1996 ..'Researching Local History : the Human Journey', which has chapters not on the one-name approach, but on studying the cross-section of names in a discrete region through the Victorian Census. It is a very readable local approach to surname studies.

In more recent years, 2 important aids have been published for the surname analyst

• The 1881 GB census on CD
• Steve Archer's Surname Atlas on CD

There is only one amateur research group that I know of, that is researching this field -
The Names Project Group in the Department of Adult and Continuing Education at the University of Sheffield, under the guidance of David Hey.
(You can read more about this group in David Hey's 'Family Names and Family History')

There is scope for other local groups to pursue this type of research on a county basis. For example, Graham Thomas has published a web study of the Surnames of Gloucestershire

As the work of the above shows, there is still much that the amateur can contribute in this field.

The most recent advances have been those of individuals -working in isolation, and often unpublished. Such as the late Eric Banwell, Martin Ecclestone and Ken Tucker.
However, David Hey, George Redmonds, and Dave Postles continue to write illuminatingly on the more academic aspects.

Cultural/Bio-anthropologists

2002/3 - This looks to be a most exciting area for the immediate future.

Local historians have debated as to what constitutes a community? The area that inhabitants most often identified with. Is it the parish or a much wider area? And if the latter, how can its possible boundaries be defined?

Family historians know that at the parish level there has been a good-turnover in surnames. But does this hide a stability if a larger area were to be chosen?

• David Hey refers to this larger area as the 'country' as in the Black Country
• Phythian-Adams alludes to the term 'pays' and has drawn maps of possible cultural provinces derived from watersheds and drainage basins.

But how does one define such an area -is their one or many kinship areas?

The area could be defined by

• a day's walk
• occupational network
• religious network

There is another possibility- the mapping of total surname distributions from the 1881 census to help define these cultural regions.

[However, the distribution of a name does not equate to the assimilation of that name in the local community. And the reach of a name might be wider than its physical distribution -due to kinship networks]

Results show that inhabitants of English city A might have migrated to city B, but the latter's inhabitants seem to have been inhibited from returning the compliment.

London stands out as an almost universal hoover - 95% of all the UK's names can be found in that city.

Graham Ullathorne in a 2004 study¹ of migration from Derbyshire to Hallamshire wrote:-

"..while many core High Peak names migrated into Sheffield, it appears that the core names of Sheffield did not spread out into the High Peak" ....
"It indicates a paradox; that there is no real border, yet the surnames of the High Peak and Sheffield are separately distinctive. A similar phenomenon exists across the Derbyshire-Staffordshire border shown in the surnames of Longnor in 1532-33"

And where else? Might there have been regions defined not by economic factors, but by a sense of belonging? Kevin Schurer in a study² of 3 Essex parishes that fringe the border with Hertfordshire discerned that the overwhelming majority of marriage partners came from parishes within the same county. It was as if the county boundary- a border marked by the River Stort- was acting as a psychological barrier.

This total mapping approach applies not just to the UK-

Surname density can be plotted against area. Some areas like Wales will surely reveal low density; whilst Lancashire a high one. Will clearly defined boundaries emerge (aligned with physical features -rivers, hills etc) or will the result be mainly amorphous? (One of the tacit assumptions that bio-anthropologists make for isonymic studies is that surname densities are even, or graduated.)

Which individual surnames will be the most diffuse, and which the most concentrated? Will they correlate to type e.g. locatives?

Surnames and occupations

Malcom Smith (University of Durham) has presented 2 case studies of closed communities (in Human Biology and History (2002)). He has used the techniques of isonymy (people bearing the same surname) and statistically manipulated the data in a sophisticated manner to produce 2-d data presented graphically. The surnames of the area are divided into broad occupational groups -farmers, fishermen etc., for each census 1841-1881. These are then plotted against each other,to reveal

• movement- whether new names are entering these occupations
• how the surname/occupation groups compare against each other

I know that this cursory description does no justice whatsoever in conveying the power of the technique. As the author says, it has potential, for example , in throwing new light on the closed and open parishes debate.

Forenames and cultural groups

Recent work by Ken Tucker on contemporary Canadian surnames has proposed that the relative size of the associated forename pool can be used to identify individual cultural groups. Could this forename-surname analysis be applied to historical UK studies in any way?

• Will areas of low surname density be found to have a much wider pool of forenames?
• Will not only surnames be strongly identified with individual occupations but also forenames or forename pools?

Onomastic fields

• When surnames were taken, (or became adhered to people) , what were the limitations on choice?
• Are there some nouns which were never used (consciously or unconsciously) as surnames? Examples?
• Can some regional surnames be grouped into onomastic fields because they are terms for similar broad features?

In his 2003 article, David Hey uses the example of Greengrass, as a notionally widespread name, which in fact is found predominantly just in East Anglia. As is the surname Ling. Do both names belong to the same regional onomastic field?
In southern England, the surnames Chalk, Chalker, Down, Downer show similar distributions. (As does Stone, surprisingly). They were names potentially available for use, just in the south ??? But not Flint, which as a likely nickname, is strong in the Pennines, but relatively unknown in the south- except for Sussex.

Onomastic dialects

1881 distribution of names with the element 'Royd'

Whilst the above examples, relate to words that belonged to a common vocabulary, there are dialect words which are restricted in use to a limited area. These might be termed onomastic dialects when used as surnames. Royd is a Yorkshire dialect word for Road i.e. a clearing, and generates surnames such as (in descending frequency) :

Holroyd, Ackroyd, Murgatroyd, Boothroyd, Oldroyd, Learoyd, Ormondroyd, Howroyd...
(an exception is Broyd - an Essex surname- which must have a separate origin)

The above distribution map demonstrates how resticted was the use of the element Royd: reaching its highest use in the Halifax Registration district

references

1Graham Ullathorne Northern History (2004)
2 Kevin Schurer 'Regional identity and populations in the past' in Naming, Society and Regional Identity

in progress

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Modern British Surname Studies
Section last revised: August 05, 2007.