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Some methodological considerations in studying

family names

Patrick HanksUniversity of the West of England,

Bristol***

FaNUK

• ‘Family names in the United Kingdom’

• AHRC grant £849,000 + PhD studentship

• Purpose: to establish a well-researched, publicly available database of family names in the UK

• xml relational database: – Entry name, early bearers, sources and references, explanation(s),

geographical distribution, comments,

– Facility ro research and edit enties in related groups

• By agreement with OUP, FaNUK will supersede the ‘Reaney revision’ project

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The team

• Richard Coates (PI)

• Peter McClure

• Patrick Hanks

• Kay Muhr

• 2 RAs

• 1 PhD student

• Consultants: Prys Morgan, Oliver Padel, Carole Hough, Alison Grant, Nollaig O Muraile, and others

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The state of the art

• Dictionary of British Surnames (1958) by P. H. Reaney– A heroic, pioneering work

– Well founded on a large collection (card file) of evidence of medieval bearers

– Revised by R. M. Wilson (1984, 1991)

– Many problems – [see next slides]

• English surnames series (led by R. McKinley)

• Monographs and Yorkshire studies by G. Redmonds

• Welsh Surnames (1985) by T. J. and Prys Morgan

• Black’s Surnames of Scotland (1946)

• A few research papers by McClure, Redmonds, and others 4

Some problems with Reaney (1)• The inventory:

• Over 20,000 current surnames in Britain are not explained by Reaney and Wilson – names like:– Alderson, Blair, Critchley, Perks, Pringle, Sneddon, ….

• Approximately 4,000 of R&W’s entries have no modern bearers – names like: – Dodell, Dogood, Dogshanks, Domesday, Dottle, Douceamour, …

• Almost no Jewish names: – no entry for Cohen; until 1991, Levy was only lsited as a variant of

English Leavey

• Garbled and sporadic coverage of Irish names

• Haphazard use of Black for Scottish names

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Some problems with Reaney (2)

• The explanations:

• Many explanations are guesses, often wrong [McClure].

• Insensitive to date.

• Insensitive to geographical distribution; largely ignored Guppy (1891).

• Literally thousands of heterogeneous groupings and fudges. Here’s one: Ravenshaw, Ravenshear, Ramshaw, Ramshire, Ranshaw,

Renshaw, Renshall, Renshell. … ‘Dweller by the raven wood’ as at Ravenshaw (Warwicks) or Renishaw (Derbys).

– David Hey has shown that Renshaw is from a place so called near Bishop Auckland (Durham)

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Some problems with Reaney (3)

• A big collection of medieval surnames

• Linked, often wrongly, to modern family names

• Does not attempt to show continuity from the medieval forms to the modern forms

• Many fudges

• Reaney had no way of measuring probability and statistically significant associations

• With modern resources, we can do better.

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Some issues in surnames research

• Source data

• Date of origin

• Etymology vs. history

• Statistical associations between surnames and localities

• Variants; literacy (lack of)

• Migration

• Polygenesis

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Surnames and Place-names

Place-name Surname

Bromwich Bromage

Greenwich Greenidge

Worcester Wooster

Leicester Lester

Stockport Stopford

Wrotham Rootham

Ludlow (in Scotland) Laidlaw

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Seminal historical moments

• Laidlaw (= Ludlow) a Scottish surname? – No surprise.

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Ramsey, Lindsay, Coventry, Barclay, Hamilton, etc.: Scottish names derived etymologically from toponyms in England

• A seminal moment in Scottish surname history:– King David I was brought up at the English court;

– Married Matilda, Countess of Huntingdon;

– After three older brothers predeceased him, he succeeded to the throne of Scotland; set about ‘Normanizing’ his administration;

– An ensuing steady flow of Norman barons, knights, adventurers, and fortune seekers northwards (then and later)

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Surnames and Family History

Rootham

• Statistically, a Bedfordshire surname.

• Derived from Wrotham in Kent. – Geoffrey de Wrotham (12th century) was a domestic servant of

successive archbishops of Canterbury

– His son William de Wrotham, became sheriff of Devon (1198)

– and grandson William de Wrotham, archdeacon of Taunton, was active in the creation of a navy temp. King John.

– Another (or the same) William de Wrotham is mentioned in the records of Harrold Priory (Beds.), 1206. This is the earliest Bedfordshire record of the family.

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Polygenesis and Monogenesis• Smith, Jones, and Johnson are polygenetic.

• Sykes, Hanks, and Pulvertaft are monogenetic – All modern bearers get the name from a single original bearer

• But what about Pardoe and Pardey?– Identical etymology (an oath name: par Dieu ‘by God’),

– Reaney lumps them together in a single entry, but:

– Pardoe is significantly associated with S. Staffs.

– Pardey with Dorset

– Almost certainly unrelated independent coinages

• Other names, e.g. Faber and Mawde, are lexically as well as genealogically polygenetic – they have different etymologies in different localities

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Name death and migration

• Tens of thousands of extinct names are recorded in ME sources (and reproduced in MED, Fransson, Löfvenberg, etc.). See handout for examples.

• The death of a surname is not a rare event. – Prediction of Sturges and Haggett (1987): of every surname borne

by one individual in 1350, over half would have died out by 1950.

• Quite a few British surnames are extinct in Britain but continue to thrive in the USA and/or Australia etc.– Examples: Throckmorton, Algeo, ....

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Surnames in Britain and Ireland

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• Constant interchange of family names across the Irish Sea since the 12th century

• Names like Walsh, Bermingham, Staunton, Stapleton are culturally Irish, despite their English etymologies

• Ideally, we need parallel research projects on both sides of the Irish Sea.

Recent immigrant names

• Britain is now a multicultural society.– A database that is planned as a public resource cannot simply

ignore this fact

• FaNUK will include ‘stub’ entries for recent immigrant names down to a certain frequency threshold– headword, frequency, and (if known) etymon

– but not fully researched entries

– to function as pointers to local resources (or the need to develop local resources)

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Principles of FaNUK

• Computational processing of resources and records, to support scholarly interpretation

• Scrutinize the explanations of earlier researchers

• Correlate surnames and localities (across time, if possible)

• Entries for all names down to agreed frequency threshold

• Give equal attention to surnames of Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and Cornish origin

• Co-operation with GOONS and genealogists

• Explanations to be written in clear, concise English (not telegraphese)

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