It doesn’t take long for the dedicated visitor to villages, towns, churches and graveyards to realize that the same surnames crop up over and over again in any given location.
Some surnames just stick in a locality, whereas others make just a fleeting visit and then there are those that stamp their authority on a place for hundreds of years only to fall away without trace in a matter of a few.
The following table of data was created out of a personal project to try and map some of the most common surnames along the Meon Valley in Hampshire from the 1841 census.
It seemed to contain some useful points garnered from looking at the data in a different way and so we thought we’d share it with you Hampshire historians. It is incomplete as the task is very big but it automatically updates as new data is added. At present the following villages are included, West Meon, Warnford, Exton, Corhampton and Meonstoke. Hampshire Family historians might find something of interest. The surnames are recorded as in the 1841 census (allowing for transcription errors) and the total number of bearers of that surname were counted. Arbitrary values of incidence have been selected to determine whether the incidence of the name has a low, average, high or very high value.
Low 1-2 bearers (blue)
Average 3-7 bearers (green)
High 8-11 bearers (red)
Very high 12+ bearers (yellow)
Note this is not number of households bearing the name but of individuals, related or unrelated. Some surnames with different spellings are obviously the same name but left as spelt as it is helpful to see the variations.
The pink line denotes the start of the next village and the names are alphabetical within each village.
The data was collected without any preconceptions about what it might reveal but in the first analysis it threw up a number of interesting points which is why we are sharing it with you but please, this is not a 100% scientific study, there will be errors but the overall data has some useful patterns. You may find other patterns or connections of interest for example and the cross match surname to location column needs to be filled, we are working on it!
West Meon
Out of 218 surnames 99 surnames were held by only 1 or 2 people, that is 45%, which seems to us to be a surprisingly high value but maybe not?
The surnames of West Meon with the highest number of bearers in 1841 are; Andrew, Aslett, Beagley, Clay, Earwaker, Edwards, Green, Greentree, Gregory, Griffin, Hammond, Harriss, Millard, Moreton, Morgon, Nicholson, Parvin, Phillips, Pile, Simpson, Simms, Street, Turner, Tutt, Welch.
