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Showing posts from December, 2019

Holyland - a surname, not just a place!

Holyland - a name and not just a place! Of all the surnames in the world, Holyland is one of the less common. The website Forebears.io uses data from 2014 and tells us that Holyland is the 594,449 th Most Common Surname in the World -- or to put it another way, not very common at all ! According to the Forebears site, approximately 522 people shared the Holyland surname in 2014. The majority (about 2/3) of these were in England; the majority of the other Holylands were in Australia, with tiny numbers of others of this name scattered across the globe, from the USA to China and Jordan.                ( map and data c/o Forebears, https://forebears.io/surnames/holyland) So where did this surname come from? When I found the name in my family tree --it was the maiden name of my great-grandmother - I felt quite excited, assuming that this maybe signified a link to the geographical area now known as the Holy Land; maybe one of my