What’s in a name?

What better way can there be to begin discovering your family history then by looking at the origin and meaning of the very surname that you inherited from your forebears.

So where do surnames come from and what do they mean?

At the start of the Middle Ages, after the Norman Conquest in 1066, most people were living in small farming communities. Everyone knew everyone so having just one name was enough. However as the population grew and people began to travel they had to find a way to distinguish themselves from others with the same first name. As a result people began to attach descriptive terms to each individual in order to set them apart.

The descriptive terms used can be split into 5 main groups.

1. Locative surnames indicate that the first bearer came from a specific place. The surname Lincoln, for example, denotes someone who came from the city of Lincoln.
2. Topographic surnames identify people by geographical features near where they lived, such as Church or Hill.
3. Metonymic (Occupational) surnames tell you what people did – Carpenter, Farmer and so on.
4. Sobriquets (or Nicknames) include surnames such as Black (probably describing hair colour), Cruikshank (bent legs), and Truelove. These nicknames might have been ironic, such as the surname Proud given to someone very shy.
5. Patronymic surnames (and less common ‘matronymics’) use the father’s name (or mother’s name) as the surname. Margesson is a matronymic surname, meaning son of Margery or Margaret, where Johnson is patronymic meaning ‘son of John’. 

What made surnames stick was the introduction of taxation. The taxman was only too pleased to distinguish one from the other when faced with four ‘Richards’ in the same village, each paying their rates and taxes in different amounts.

Once the taxman had made the distinction he would have been loath to change his records so once a surname was recorded in the parish rate list, there it remained for life. Not only that, but when ‘Richard’ died and the responsibility of rate paying moved to his son, the taxman would have simply crossed out Richard and replaced it with his son’s name and left the surname unaltered.

This is the way that surnames relating to one man only became hereditary, passing down to every member of the family.