Origin of British surnames
In the January 2010 issue of the BBC History magazine (v11, n10, p12-13) there was an article by David Keys that caught my eye about the story of British surnames and how linguists are about to embark on a ground-breaking study of the evolution of some 40.000 British surnames which promises to illuminate Britain’s social, economic and ethnic heritage. What follows below is summarized from this article as well as from the press release announcing it the study.
This major new research project, being led by the University of the West of England (UWE) at Bristol, is set to create the largest ever database of the UK's family surnames. The database, which will eventually contain the meanings and origins of up to 150,000 UK surnames, is to be made publicly available. The database will describe the origins of names, both in linguistic terms and also how they arose in the first place. By listing the spellings of the name with a date, the researchers will be able to see how names have changed over the years and in some cases this will also give a snapshot of social history and mobility.
This means that it will be of enormous interest to armchair genealogists, family historians, and anyone interested in learning more about their family name - what does it mean? where does it come from? has it changed over the centuries? It should certainly be of interest to the Raitts. We have seen spellings as diverse as Raitt, Rait, Raite and Reat - often in the same family, even the same person. In an earlier blog I rhetorically asked why Raitt had two ts - perhaps this research will answer the question!.
The research is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and will be carried out by Professor Richard Coates at the Bristol Centre for Linguistics at UWE with lead researcher Dr Patrick Hanks, an eminent lexicographer who is a visiting professor at UWE. The project will begin in April 2010 and will last four years. It is planned to have the database available online for public consultation from 2014.
The project is the largest in scale and scope ever undertaken in the UK, or indeed the world, on family names. Over the past thousand years, Britain has been home to some 200.000 surnames – somewhere around a third of which are recent introductions. Only about one fifth of the surnames existed before 1945, half of which (i.e. about 20.000) were present before 1870. Thousands of surnames have also become extinct over the centuries. The average number of surnames at any one time between the 14th and 18th centuries was around 20.000, but currently there are approximately 150,000 surnames in Britain - including very common ones such as Smith, Jones, Brown or Williams - but there are also large numbers of uncommon surnames with only a hundred or so bearers.
Surnames have been used in Britain for some 800 years, adopted first in the south in the 12th century (largely due to Norman influence and tax and official record requirements) and in the north by the 15th century. Many Irish and Highland Scottish names derive from Gaelic personal names, as do those of the Welsh. Some surnames have origins that are occupational (e.g. Shepherd, Miller), or linked to a particular place (e.g. Coates, Sutherland) or that are patronymic and incorporate the father's name (e.g. Robertson, McDonald), or that describe the original person or might be a nickname (e.g. Redhead, Armstrong).
Using published and unpublished resources, dating from as far back as the 11th century, the team of researchers will collect information about individual names such as when and where they were recorded and how they have been spelled. This information will be used to give new and detailed explanations of those names. This new knowledge will be far more reliable and up to date than that found in the books on surnames currently available. Initially, the etymology of some 40.000 British-originating surnames will be investigated; but the project will also cover 19th and early 20th century immigrant names as well as some 75.000 overseas-originating surnames introduced into Britain since the end of the 2nd World War – specially from the Indian subcontinent, Africa, the Caribbean, China and Eastern Europe.
Thus the study will not focus exclusively on names of English and Scots origin, but will also include names of Norman French, Gaelic, Welsh, and Cornish origin as well as Huguenot, Jewish and later immigrant names. The project will be supported by consultants who are the top authorities on names in those languages which have given us our surnames such as: Old Scandinavian, Anglo-Norman French, Welsh, Cornish, Gaelic, Yiddish, and more recently other languages such as Polish, Chinese, Arabic and Hindi/Urdu.
This resource will be a permanently publicly accessible database that people can use for a range of information. Each name will have separate fields which include: the meaning of the surname; the linguistic origin, the geographical origin and the distribution. In addition there will be information about the social origins of names. New statistical methods for linking family names to locations will provide more accurate and detailed origins for names and allow researchers to understand from which areas and to what extent people migrated within Britain from the Middle Ages onwards.
The official press release on the study can be found on the UWE site.
http://info.uwe.ac.uk/news/UWENews/article.asp?item=1651&year=2009
The BBC also has an interesting page on surnames and their derivation on its family history site.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/familyhistory/get_started/surnames_01.shtml
And this site covers the etymology and history of surnames, but also includes the most common Scottish, American, Irish, English and other surnames.
Tuesday, 2 February 2010
