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Guild of One-Name Studies

One-name studies, Genealogy

Is your surname here?

    • 2,539 members
    • 2,327 studies
    • 8,244 surnames

Developments

The best in-depth analysis of how/why surnames mutate has been George Redmonds Surnames and Genealogy : A New Approach. Dr Redmonds shows -through his study of the use of aliases in Yorkshire parish records- the depth of uncertainty that parish clerks had in understanding and recording local names. Previously, the extent of name changes had been regarded as a minor phenomenon ; Dr Redmonds demonstrates that it was a process of major importance in enlarging the stock of surnames in Yorkshire.

“George Redmonds’ Yorkshire examples show that, although some apparent variations in names were simply misspellings by clerks (or in some cases humorous adaptations by clergymen), many surnames changed permanently. Some alterations were minor ones, involving the dropping of aspirates or of consonants such as a final ‘d’ or ‘t’, but others were more basic because of the the different speech customs of the district into which a family or individual moved.” (Source: David Hey Family Names and Family History, p. 84)

Surnames were being changed through peer pressure, into new forms that bore no resemblance to the original name. For example Cowgill being tranformed into Coldhill. Such transformations could be temporary, and revert on future migration, or could become permanent.

Andrew Todd in his Shadows of Ancestors has summarised some of Dr Redmonds’ earlier findings and identifies the following processes:

Surname separation e.g. Hinchcliffe developed 20 mutations -Henchcliffe,Hincliff, Incliff
Surname interaction Confusion between 2 surnames produces a 3rd Ollerhead & Holroyd interact to form Oldroyd
Surname assimilation An incoming surname becomes absorbed into an existing local surname (often a local placename surname). This process may be temporary or permanent Lancashire Catteralls are treated as Cotteril, when migrating to Staffordshire.
Associative Etymology Locals try to make sense of a name, phonetically D’Orleans is rendered as Darling

Names with the following structure are liable to be affected:

Names with interchangeable forms interchange Moor and Mower, Sharman and Sherman
Simplification of polysyllabic names Badilonde > Badelond > Badlan
Vocalisation or lack of terminal stress leads to suffix confusion Everard > Everett
Soft consonants (e.g. v) liable to abbreviation Littleover > Littler
Similarly pronounced letter interchangeable e.g. F/V or G/K Gilpin > Kilpin
B/P and D/T interchangeable Radcliffe > Ratcliffe
Loss of a consecutive consonant Hartley > Harley
Metathesis -the shifting of letters Firth > Frith
Metanalysis – shifting of letter from forename to surname Otley > Notley

Qu/W

S Carlsson in Studies on Middle English Local By-Names in East Anglia (Lund, 1989) p 161, averred that the voicing of W and Wh by Q was a distinctively northern phenomenon, particularly characteristic of Lancashire, although it does occur sporadically outside of ‘the north’, e.g. Robert Peperquit in a 13th century Sussex charter.

K/C substitution (velar and palatal plosives)

The consonantal substitution of k for c in northern zones is a familiar phenomenon of late Middle English. This was not just a spelling change, but a voiced one as well, in some surnames and by-names, e.g. Godrik (south) vs Godrich (north)

K/C insertion

e.g. Sklater < Slater and Skaithlock < Scathelok

If you have a more than passing interest in surname variance, then you must read Todd and above all George Redmonds. I have included an Appendix which lists changes in much finer detail.

For a discussion of what might constitute a variant, please read Peter Christian’s various papers, which are held on the Thesaurus of British Surnames website.

How can a true variant be determined? A difficult question. However, it is possible to say that B cannot be a variant of A, because it would then violate the rules of the sounds of English. [Peter demonstrated this in his paper What surname distribution cannot teach us.]

Sources:

George Redmonds Surnames and Genealogy New England, Historic Genealogical Society, 1997
George Redmonds Migration and the Linguistic Development of Surnames, Family History, Vol 11, No 77/78, Aug 1980
Andrew Todd Shadows of Ancestors, Allen and Todd 1996

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Modern British Surnames

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  • Modern British Surnames
    • About the research
    • Distribution
    • Variance
      • Pronunciation
      • Clergy
      • Dialects
      • Spelling
      • Developments
      • Deviants
      • Appendix 1
      • Appendix 2
      • Appendix 3
    • Statistics
    • Bibliography
    • Teaching
    • Taxonomy

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