15 RARE English Surnames With Roots Older Than Roman Britain

Your English surname can point back to a place name spoken in Britain before the Romans landed. These English last names carry the origin and meaning of rivers, hills and forts the Britons named first, from York and Kent to Dover and London. We trace fifteen surnames through Roman geography, the Domesday Book and medieval place-name scholarship to decode English ancestry, surname meaning and name etymology for every English American, Australian and Canadian family. Number 15: Pen... Number 14: Mal... Number 13: Av... Number 12: Der... Number 11: Le... Number 10: Se... Number 9: Th... Number 8: Lo... Number 7: Ma... Number 6: Do... Number 5: Tr... Number 4: Car... Number 3: Yo... Number 2: Ke... Number 1: ??? One honest note: this is about names and records, not DNA. A village surname tells you where an ancestor lived and left. The places were named centuries before the surnames were fixed. Two names on this list resist a clean answer. The word behind London is on the record from the first century and no accepted translation for it exists; the evidence stops at the spelling. The Trent may mean trespasser, a river that leaves its channel, but that reading is disputed and the floods are the only part the record confirms. Both stayed in because the gap is worth showing. Sources: A. L. F. Rivet and Colin Smith, The Place-Names of Roman Britain; Eilert Ekwall, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names; P. H. Reaney and R. M. Wilson, A Dictionary of English Surnames; Hanks, Coates and McClure, The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland; A. D. Mills, A Dictionary of British Place-Names. Narration is a synthetic voice created for this channel. It imitates no real person. Click here to subscribe:    / @thesurnameregister   #EnglishSurnames #Ancestry #FamilyHistory