Welcome to the Butt Families DNA Project. Butt, Butts, Buttes and Butte are all surname variations used by participants in the Butt Family DNA Project. English historical records have shown that the same inidividuals name may be spelled Butt, Butts, or Buttes in different documents. The name Butt, and its variants, are most often of Northern European origin. Immigration of various families have been recorded beginning in the 17th Century and are predominently from England, Ireland and Germany. In 1891, the British Census reported the most people named Butts in the UK were from the County of Kent. By contrast, people named Butt were mostly in Gloucestershire, Hampshire, Somerset and London. In 1840, the U.S. Cesus reported most Butt families in America were in Virginia (62) with Ohio next in number. Lesser distributions were found in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina and Georgia. In contract, most Butts families were in New York (124), with lesser distributions in Georgia and Massachusetts. In the 1990 United States Census, there were 27,357 people named Butts (0.011% of the population, ranking 1144) and 4,974 people named Butt (0.002% of the population, ranking 5,069). Acc ording to Ancestry, the origin of the surname Butt (and its variations Butts and Butte) comes from: 1. English: topographic name for someone who lived near a place used for archery practice, from Middle English butte ‘mark for archery’, ‘target’, ‘goal’. In the Middle Ages archery practice was a feudal obligation, and every settlement had its practice area. 2. English: topographic name from Middle English butte ‘strip of land abutting on a boundary’, ‘short strip or ridge at right angles to other strips in a common field’. 3. English: from Middle English butte, bott ‘butt’, ‘cask’, applied as a metonymic occupational name for a cooper or as a nickname possibly for a heavy drinker or for a large, fat man. 4. English: from a Middle English personal name, But(t), of unknown origin, perhaps originally a nickname meaning ‘short and stumpy’, and akin to late Middle English butt ‘thick end’, ‘stump’, ‘buttock’ (of Germanic origin). 5. German and English: in both Middle Low German and Middle English the word but(te) denoted various types of marine fish, originally a fish with a blunt head, for example halibut (German Heilbutt) or turbot (German Steinbutt), and the surname may in some cases be a metonymic occupational name for a seller of fish or salt fish. 6. Kashmiri: variant of Bhatt. C. L’Estrage Ewen, A History of Surnames of the British Isles, (1931), p. 232, classifies Butt as one of numerous English surnames taken from hill and dale, the forest and farmyard. Surnames from Topographical Features. Under the manorial system the territory occupied by a village community was limited by the boundary marks, and the arable land separated into fields to provide for the annual rotation of crops. The open fields were divided into furlongs (furrow-long) or shots with head lands on which the plough was turned, and the furlongs were split up into selions, lands, strips, ridges, or rigs of an acre or half-acre by balks of turf. Banks be. tween terraces were called lynches, abutting strips were known as butts; narrow projecting parts as spongs; tongues of land as steortes; and odd triangular pieces were described as gores. From these italicized terms, common among husbandmen, were derived such surnames as Acre, Bank, Butt, Field, Furlong, Gore, Halfacre, Head (Headley, etc.), Land, Lynch, Mark, Ridge, Rigg, Shott, Spong, Storte, and Stripp.... It is customary to say that such surnames as these were derived from places of residence, but the fact is that the holdings being scattered strips, the husbandmen had perforce to live in the villages, and it is much more probable that the labourers were known to their fellow men and the officials of the manor by the descriptions of their land holdings which in time became their family surnames. Henry Brougham Guppy, Homes of Family Names of Great Britain, (1890, repr. 1968), p. 464. Guppy shows that the Butt surname appeared in fewer than ten shires as far back as the 1330s, mostly in the adjoining southwestern shires of Gloucester, Somerset, Dorset, and Devon.
Posted on: Fri, 14 Nov 2014 15:05:24 +0000
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