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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

594,449th 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 ancestors had been on the Crusades? My skin tone has a definite tinge of olive - is this where it came from?

Well, no. Much more prosaically, whilst it is likely that the name is derived geographically, it's more likely to have been from an area of holly trees. Holly may have been used as winter fodder for livestock in years gone by, and it's reasonable to suppose that therefore, the population would have been aware of where it grew, and may have actually cultivated it by creating holly haggs, and thus the holly-laund could have been adopted by a family in that area as their identifying family name. From the mid 16th century onwards, variants of the name have included Holliland, Holiland, Holleland and Hollyland, sometimes with an -e suffixed; I'd venture to suggest that in the past, the more common pronunciation would have been as Holly, rather than as Holy.

Only relatively recently has the spelling of the name become more fixed as Holyland. According to freebmd.org.uk, there have been no registered births, marriages or deaths in England and Wales of anyone called Hollyland since 1901, and only 9 incidences of this variant in the 64 years preceding this. Holiland, which was perhaps the commonest variation in 16th and 17th century records, had nearly died out before the onset of formal registration - there are only 3 instances on free BMD, the last one in being in 1877. From 1960 to 1985 (the latest year shown on the free BMD indexes), Holylands outweighed Hollilands by almost 11:1.

And where did the ancestors of these modern day Holy-and Hollilands come from? Well, it appears that nearly everyone born with these surnames now can trace their ancestry back to Desford, a village in the Hinckley and Bosworth district of Leicestershire, in the heart of England. Early parish records also show variants of the name in London, what was probably a single family in Cheshire, and a possible variant in Yorkshire, but the Leicestershire Holilands (as they were then) have spread slowly across England and from there, to other parts of the globe.
                            

Who were the Holylands? Where did they worship, how did they earn their living, what skills did they have? What were their preferred family names, names through which we can identify different branches of the family over decades? As in any growing family, some were successful and built up comfortable businesses; others fell by the wayside and grew unhappily familiar with the local prisons, asylums and workhouses. In future blog postings I plan to explore some of these aspects and write about some of the more notable members of the family.

If you have any link to the wider Holyland family,including the variants as above, or any questions or comments, please let me know!

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