Skip to main content

Holliland – a name rescued from extinction

 My Holyland one-name study lists Holiland, Hollyland and Holliland as variants of interest. The first two of these variant names seem no longer to be in use, but Holliland survives as a current, albeit rare, variation.

So how do the Hollilands fit into the Holyland lineage?

 extract from parish records of 1610 from St Martins' Church, Desford, Leicestershire,

Going back into the earliest available records on the internet, Holliland was a relatively common variant of Holyland in the 16th century, especially in the south east of England; however it had mutated there into the more common Holyland by the 18th century.

The majority of Holyland families were (and still are) in Leicestershire and here, the first use of the Holliland spelling in parish records appears in 1610 in Desford, when Luke White married Elizabeth Holliland. The Holliland spelling was used sporadically in various parish records across the county and further afield throughout the 17th century but its use was decreasing by the 18th century and by the mid 1800s it appeared to be on the verge of extinction.

It is probably only due to the vagaries of 19th century record keeping that the name survived.

The 1861 census shows John Holliland, his wife Caroline and their young children living in the Leicestershire village of Whetstone. John had not been baptised Holliland; he was one of eight children born to an agricultural labourer by the name of Stanford Holyland, who presumably was illiterate – at any rate, Stanford had not corrected the parish clerk when no fewer than five different variants of his name had been used in the baptisms of his children! However, none of these was Holliland, and the 1861 census seems to be the first time this spelling was used.

Subsequent censuses show that the spelling was still far from fixed, with John and his children variously appearing as Holyland and Holland. However, John’s oldest son William signed his name Holliland on his marriage certificate and William's only surviving child, George Clipson Holliland, kept this spelling throughout his life, passing it on to his descendants. Those descendants are still living today in Leicestershire as well as other parts of the UK, with a few family members in Scandinavia (where I imagine the name may well undergo further changes in the future).

 

William Holliland's signature

According to the website Forebears.io, in 2014 there were 43 bearers of the Holliland name across the word, and another 6 with a double –barrelled version hyphenated with another surname.  The name is clinging on – my records suggest just 7 births registered as Holliland in England and Wales in the first 20 years of this century (compared with 96 Holylands). Having explored the lineages, I believe that every Holliland today is descended from Stanford Holyland through his great-grandson, George Clipson Holliland. But as always, I welcome any comments or further information!

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 ge...
Post a Comment
Read more

Swimming lessons

Arthur Holyland was born in 1877 in Wortley, a village to the north of Sheffield, in Yorkshire. Like his father and grandfather before him, Arthur trained as a blacksmith. When he was a child, Arthur's family moved from the rural setting of Wortley and into the heavily industrialised centre of Sheffield, which at the time was one of the world's leading centres for the manufacturing of steel items. In August 1899, Arthur enlisted into the Royal Marines, giving his age as 2 years younger than his baptism proves. He served on a variety of vessels before being invalided out of the Marines in 1908. My eye was caught by a small box at the bottom of the Marines enlistment form . "Able to swim?" – Yes, Arthur could swim – he was tested on this in December 1899, in Deal, Kent, four months after joining the Royal Marines. How did a blacksmith from a heavily industrialised town in a landlocked county learn to swim, I asked myself. It transpires that in 1892, a tidal swi...
Post a Comment
Read more

An unusual marriage certificate

  Willoughby Holyland was born in 1868 in Lutterworth, Leicestershire; there is no entry for his mother’s maiden name on the birth registration, implying that he was illegitimate. He was listed in 1871 as “Willie”, the 1 year old son of Charles Holyland, a shoeing smith in Lutterworth, and his wife Ann. Three other children were listed in the same family, including a William apparently only one year old than “Willie”. Immediately this duplication of names sounds suspicious! Charles repeated that he was Willoughby’s father, as well as William’s, in 1881. In 1891, Willoughby, now a tailor by trade, was still in Charles’ and Ann’s household, but this time described as Charles’s nephew. Willoughby’s marriage certificate sheds light on his true parentage. In August 1899, he married Lily Sarah Beatrice Davies at St Jude’s Church, in Birmingham. In my experience of looking at Victorian marriage certificates, those born illegitimately usually either have a line drawn through the box ...
Post a Comment
Read more