OVERY was the maiden name of my maternal grandmother - the only grandparent I ever knew. Since her name was the only unusual name in the family, I was always intrigued by it and eventually decided to pursue a one-name study on it.

Unlike my other one-name study of Shankland, the population of which is mainly in Scotland, the Overy study has been centred more locally in the south-east of England, which has been a welcome change as far as research goes.

I have to admit that although I have been collecting odd references to Overy worldwide for several years now, it was only at the beginning of 2022 that I started systematically researching and collating Overy births, deaths, marriages and census entries in the UK. At present, therefore, I have only very limited knowledge of Overys in the rest of the world, although I do intend to cover these as fully as I can in the future.

I am still undecided on the question of what is a valid variant of Overy. There are some obvious misspellings or deviants of Overy that I have come across: Ovary, Overee, Overie, Over, etc. Originally I believed that Ouvry was a variant of Overy, but now I'm not so sure, as I haven't yet found any instances where the names are exchanged.

Currently I'm restricting my research to Overy only, hoping that I shall find out what the real variants are when I go searching for an individual who seems to have gone missing in the records!

There is inevitably some confusion in handwritten documentation between Overy and Avery, but I am convinced that the names are not related.

The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland includes the name Overy and provides two derivations:

1. locative name denoting someone dwelling ‘on the other side of the stream’, Middle English over ē, ā, or ǣ (Old English ēa ’river’).
2. locative name denoting someone dwelling ‘beyond the low‐lying land’ (Old English ēg)

I would conclude that both of them relate to someone living "over there somewhere".

The name is found most frequently in the south-east of England - Kent, Essex, Suffolk, Surrey, Sussex, and of course London, especially the East End.