Surnames

[bencrouch]

What do our surnames mean?

[emccourt]

Up until the 1600s or thereabouts, a lot of people didn't have surnames. It wasn't until a national census required them to have registered surnames that they were widely adopted. Many people took surnames that described their craft - Fisher, Farmer, Tanner, Tailor - or where they were from. Others took derivatives of their father's name. This was particularly prevalent in Celtic regions - the prefixes Mc, Mac, O, and ap usually mean 'son of'. Other surnames come from translations from other languages - for instance, Bashford is derived from the French surname De Basford. There are numerous websites that detail the origins of surnames, generally available via genealogy searches.

[emccourt]

And in case you were wondering, the surname Crouch means 'An English place name for the man who lived near the stone cross set up by the roadside or marketplace, from Old Norse kross '.

[sgs]

There's an article on surnames at article 2055