Welcome to all Kerfoot family members no matter how you spell it and no matter where you live now. Please get in touch and let us know where you fit in. We love hearing from you!

In early times when levels of literacy were low, those making the records would, in the absence of a precedent to copy, write a name phonetically - as they heard it. Thus, there were a variety of spellings of the same name. In time, literacy, communications and travel improved and together with more printed material, the variations have distilled into just a few. The line between a misspelling and a variant is for debate, but one's name is one's identity - a very precious and personal thing. 

Some of the variants and misspellings are - with the most common and enduring ones in bold: Carefoot/Carfoot, Corfoot, Karfoot, Kearfoot, Keirfoot, Kerfut, Kerfott, Kirfoot. There are plenty of others. Let us know if you think one should be included here.

Most evidence points to the name being a topographic surname: Someone who lives at the foot of a hill or in a valley, combined with the old English "cyrr" for a bend in a river or road, or the Norse "kerr" or "kjarr" for a scrubby/marshy place.

One suggestion for the origin is a small hamlet - no more than a few farm buildings at a country crossroads - near Bilsborrow north of Preston in Lancashire called Carefoot. Showing this to be the origin of the Kerfoot name is ever so unlikely, but it is a hypothesis nevertheless. Others may have their own theories on the origin. It's fun to explore them!

I'm gradually pulling together a list of famous Kerfoot people, places and businesses. Let me know of any you find.

According to FamilyNames.org, there are about 2619 Kerfoots in the world - just short of 1 in 3 million. Most of them are in The United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. They rate it as a very rare surname.

Most evidence points to origins in the Lancashire and Cheshire area of England and/or Ireland. In both areas, Kerfoot populations are present beyond the time periods where paper methods of genealogical research become much more difficult.  Family groups from both England and Ireland have now spread to disparate parts of the world - but were the English and Irish populations related?

The map here and others like it are available on the Kerfoot One-Name website.

All the data collected so far is on the Kerfoot One-Name Study website.

A DNA project has the potential to reveal exciting discoveries and a Y-DNA project is underway at FamilyTreeDNA.

The many Kerfoot branches are possibly linked to a common ancestor and I hope this research will point to evidence of that in time.

There have been a number of studies and even a handful of books on the Kerfoot name or its variations. 

• Kerfoot, Kearfott, and allied families in America : Robert R. Kearfott, 1948. Available at FamilySearch, and Ancestry
• A Kerfoot history - Canadian branch : J.M. Morris, 1953. This is available in some Canadian libraries, but I haven't found it elsewhere.
• The Kerfoots of Lancashire and North Wales: R. Glyn Davies, 1995. Privately published by the author who sadly died in 1998. Copies will be very difficult to find.