My name is Rosalind Moffitt and I have established Nameswell as an accumulation of my interest in the English language, family history and names. I studied English Language at Durham University, and then trained as a Speech and Language Therapist (SLT) at City University, London. Much of my work as a SLT has involved analysing changes in speech development, which are similar to the changes which have occurred in the majority of surnames over the centuries. I am also a keen family historian, and it was while researching my own genealogy that I realised surnames hold the key to a whole new era of family history.

Until the introduction of parish registers in the mid 16th century, most documents mention only the aristocracy and wealthy landowners by name. The majority of our ancestors, the farmers, artisans and agricultural labourers, were rarely recorded, and so traditional family history falters as written records fail. Yet those ancestors passed on to us one vital clue, about their whereabouts, occupation, name or attribute, at the time when surnames became hereditary, sometime between the 11th and the 17th centuries.

I found the majority of surnames on my own family tree are most common in the north east of England. This means that the majority of my ancestors were living in that region when surnames became hereditary. I could surmise that, if my family were settled there so many hundreds of years ago, it was likely that they had arrived when the region was first populated by the Vikings, the Angles, the Romans and the Celts … even the first nomadic tribes who reached the north 9,000 years ago. Family history took on a whole new meaning!