Academics W.G. Hoskins The famous local historian W.G. Hoskins included a chapter on ‘The Homes of Family Names’ in his Local History in England, first published 1959. He covered the extent of mobility of the population; telephone directory analysis; case-studies from Devon and Cornwall (including a distribution map for the name ‘Williams’ in that county). Hoskins became the first professor of local history at Leicester University in 1965, and that postgraduate department’s association with surname studies was consolidated with the establishment of the Marc Fitch Fellowship. This sponsorship allowed the launch in 1965 of a very important venture, The English Surnames Survey, under Richard McKinley. McKinley “brought not only a thorough technical expertise, but a wide general knowledge to bear on the interpretation of his material.” (Hey). He published surveys of the surnames of the counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Oxford, Lancashire and Sussex. David Postles is the current Marc Fitch Fellow, and has published studies of the surnames of Devon, Leicestershire and Rutland. Further information on the English Surnames Survey The English Surnames Survey [link no longer available] is scholarly and authoritative. However it is necessarily selective. A telephone directory analysis of Kent and Sussex surnames that was published in Nomina, revealed that many Sussex habitation names are not discussed by McKinley, that only 10% of the surnames listed in McKinley’s index were shown to have survived as modern surnames, particularly associated with Sussex. Moreover, many of the surnames discussed were not specific to Sussex, but were common and widespread in other regions as well. This shows the need for the future of the study of surnames to adopt a wide-ranging approach. The etymologists need to accommodate the results of statistical surveys. On the other hand, the results of any statistical analyses do need to be made more widely available. David Hey The study of surname distribution has been made more accessible in the 1990s through the work of Professor David Hey at the University of Sheffield, where he was the Professor of Local and Family History. David Hey is a strong exponent of the existence of core families, and therefore surnames, loyal to a particular area over a long period of time. He has delivered lectures on the distinctive surnames of Hallamshire and Staffordshire. His seminal work to date (1999) is an article entitled The Local History of Family Names in which he demonstrated that examples of every category of English surname, not just locative, reveal distinctive historical regional signatures. Professor Hey bases his work on a database that he has created of the surnames in the GRO death registers for the 5 year period, 1842-1846. “The mapping of the raw data contained in the civil registration indexes is a revealing exercise that shows, time and time again, the remarkable stability of very many families over the centuries if we look not at single parishes, but at a wider neighbourhoods, or ‘countries’… The maps also indicate the likeliest places of origin for most of these names back in the Middle Ages.” (Hey, 1997) David Hey also leads the Names Project team whose work as a group of enthusiasts properly belongs to the next section. To Read; David Hey, “Family names and Family history” (Hambledon & London, 2000) David Hey, “The Local History of Family Names”, Local Historian 27, no. 4 (November 1997): i-xx. David Hey, “Family names and family history”, History Today 51, no. 7 (July 2001): 38-40. David Hey, “Recent advances in the study of surnames”, The Historian 80 (Dec 2003). George Redmonds George Redmonds, like David Hey, is an advocate of the ‘new’ multi-discliplinary approach. Dr Redmonds studied surnames to postgraduate level at Leicester University, and the main thrust of his work to date has concentrated on Yorkshire names. He was the first to suggest that many surviving topographic surnames may have a common origin – a viewpoint that appears to have been supported by the results of Sykes’s DNA study. Dr Redmonds particularly proposed in 1973 that the widespread surname Brooks emanated from the Huddersfield area, ramified greatly there, and migrated to other areas. This does seem to be borne out by the 1881 distribution of that name. To ponder: DNA results – like Sykes – do not build in models of surname ramification/extinction. Will the same DNA haplotype be found in common across several/many different surnames? In 1997, Dr Redmonds produced his important Surnames and Genealogy: a new approach (republished: FFHS). This was cogently reviewed in Nomina, as follows (in paraphrase). “For the last forty years genealogists have relied on P.H. Reaney’s Dictionary of British Surnames for accurate etymologies of modern family names… Reaney’s method was to deduce origins of modern names from a random collection of Middle English bynames whose genealogical connections with the modern names had not been demonstrated. His etymologies took little account of the… contexts in which name forms occurred and largely ignored the linguistic transformations that took place in surnames between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries. By contrast, the underlying thesis of [this book] is that every family name has a particular origin and a unique history. Where Reaney’s approach was general and narrowly linguistic, Redmonds’ ‘new approach’ is particular and multi-disciplinary, tracing the history and spellings of each name through precisely localised contexts… Here at last is a book that shows exactly how some modern surnames developed from their actual mediaeval originals.” However, the ‘new approach’ requires genealogists to acquire linguistic skills, and this book leaves them not knowing how to get help or training. To read: George Redmonds, Names and History: People, places and things (Hambledon & London, 2004) – Chapters 2 and 3 George Redmonds, Surnames and Genealogy: A new approach (New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1997)