The DISTRIBUTION of the SURNAME MASSINGHAM and its VARIANTS in BRITAIN

© Greg Harper, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003

Church Croft Cottage,

Wicken Bonhunt,

Saffron Walden,

Essex CB11 3UF,

United Kingdom.

Edition 5 (updated March 2003)

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A. ORIGINS of the MASSINGHAM and MESSINGHAM SURNAMES

1. Introduction - locative origin of the surnames Massingham and Messingham

The surname Massingham is a rare one, and is consistently interpreted by all authorities to derive from the place-names of two villages in Norfolk, England - Great and Little Massingham. Thus, Reaney cites some early occurrences of the surname (Ralph de Massingham, 1208; Adam de Messingham, 1264-5; Robert Massyngham, 1374-5; see below) and interprets the surname as a locative surname (i.e. one based on a place-name) derived from Great and Little Massingham (Reaney, P.H. & Wilson, R.M., A Dictionary of English Surnames; 3rd edn., Routledge, London, 1991). Hanks and Hodges state that Massingham is a habitation name derived from the Norfolk village, so called from Old English Moessingham, or homestead (OE ham) associated with Moessa (Hanks, P. & Hodges, F., A Dictionary of Surnames; Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1988). Basil Cottle (The Penguin Dictionary of Surnames, 2nd edn., Penguin Books, London, 1978) again interprets the surname as a local (locative) one, meaning "homestead of (the gang of) an Anglo-Saxon called Maessa", based on the Old English names for the two Norfolk villages.

Rye expands the analysis of the village name, meaning homestead of Maessa's people, by listing the Old English components - Moessa + ingas (the people of) + ham (homestead) (Rye, J., A Popular Guide to Norfolk Place Names; The Larks Press, Dereham, 1991). Cameron repeats the interpretation of the Massingham place-name (Maessa, + ham = homestead village), but he also adds an analysis of Messingham, a village in North Lincolnshire, which he records as having an identical derivation (Cameron, K., English Place-names; B.T. Batsford Ltd., 1961). Interestingly, Cameron states that Norfolk, with 42, has more place names including "-ingham" than any other English county. Mills derives the Massingham place-name's origin in almost identical terms (homestead of the family or followers of a man called Maessa, from the Old English personal name + inga + ham), quoting the Domesday Book (1086) as recording the place as Masingeham (Mills, A.D., A Dictionary of English Place Names; Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1991). White's 1883 Norfolk Directory claims that Massingham was previously called Marsincham, from its situation partly on a low marshy common, but this interpretation does not seem to be widely held.

The reference to the place-name Messingham is interesting because there is also a surname Messingham, implying that Messingham is a locative surname too. It is even rarer than Massingham, and may have been used interchangeably with Massingham in some well-documented cases (discussed further below). Indeed, Reaney (loc cit) interprets this surname as a variant on Massingham, referring again to the Norfolk villages and not the Lincolnshire one. The distribution of the surname Messingham in England is therefore also analysed in this document. The variants Missingham and Mussingham are yet rarer still - only Missingham occurs often enough to allow some exploration of its geographic distribution here. To date, I have found no use of the spelling Mossingham.

See also below for further, potentially related surnames and locations.

2. Is Massingham the true original surname of the family described on this Web site?

In Morston, Norfolk, a number of the earliest ancestors of the family studied as Massingham and recorded extensively elsewhere on this Web site are recorded in the parish records as having the surnames Masing or Masinge. There is a very clear transformation of the same key individual's surname from this spelling into Massingham in his later years:

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Whether this change was a standardisation of an aberrant or phonetic spelling (a mumbled Massingham, dropping the voice - especially with a broad Norfolk accent - on the last syllable, could be mistaken for Masing), a shift to Massingham on the assumption that the Masing(e) family probably originated from the reasonably nearby Norfolk village and so "ought" to be called by the village's name, a real change of surname or just the abandonment of some personal abbreviation used by the local priest or his clerk out of laziness is unclear.

In many older documents, different spellings of the names Massingham and Messingham are fairly common, including variants with a single "s". Given the limited literacy of the population at these times, these are not regarded as significant variants in the present analysis.

3. Early examples of the surname Massingham as a reference to some-one's place of origin

There are numerous mentions of people with the name Massingham in early documents, e.g. those summarised in Table 1. However, as far as I am aware, no-one has traced any holders of the Massingham surname back to the Norfolk villages of the same name, the earliest known members of the Massingham family with proven genealogical connections to the present day being from Morston, on the North Norfolk coast. There is a Will (1519-29, Norwich Archdeaconry Court, ref W436, microfilm reference MF/RO 287/1) in the Norfolk Record Office which was made by a John Massingham living in the village of Massingham, but associations of surname and village are surprisingly unusual, and the genealogy of this John Massingham has not, to my knowledge, been traced. The Norfolk Record Office has a number of earlier Wills referring to the Massingham surname (also included in Table 1), and the testators come from a variety of Norfolk villages.

Nevertheless, it is reasonable to suppose that the Morston Massinghams and others with the surname were originally from Massingham and, as relatively fixed and inherited surnames became the usual practice, they switched from being called, for example, Thomas from Massingham (Thomas de Massingham) to Thomas Massingham. Reaney (loc cit) records that the link "de" is mostly preserved through the 14th century, but usually absent after 1400, rather surprisingly beginning to disappear a long time before surnames became hereditary. Francis Blomefield's History of Norfolk records many de Massingham entries, many of which are associated with the history of the place Massingham. McKinley describes, in East Anglia, the gradual spread of hereditary surnames, such that some of the most important families had developed them by the 12th century, small freeholders by the 13th and almost everyone by the 14th century (McKinley, R.A., Norfolk & Suffolk surnames in the Middle Ages; English Surname Series, vol. 2; Phillimore, 1975). Locative surnames seem to have become adopted around a century before occupational ones or names based on nicknames (Rogers, C.D., The surname detective; Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1995). Rogers also notes that it was usual for only one family at a time in a given area to be given a particular name, which suggests that the Massinghams in each village may have been related to each other.

One documented early example of the surname and abode coinciding appears in the Victoria History of the Counties of England series, Norfolk, volume II (Archibald Constable, London):

A small Austin priory, dedicated to the honour of the blessed Virgin and afterwards to Saints Mary and Nicholas, was founded at Great Massingham before 1260, probably by Nicholas le Syre of Massingham. (presumably "the sire" or squire).

In 1260, Nicholas de Massingham granted to the Prior William of the hospital of St. Mary of Massingham, a messuage and mill and two carucates of land in Great and Little Massingham.

The house had but a small endowment. The taxation roll of 1291 shows it had possessions in 6 Norfolk parishes ... (whether these possessions tally with the later distribution of the surname Massingham across North Norfolk is intriguing).

There is an elaborate survey and rental of the possessions of Massingham Priory at Candlemass, 1540 at the Public Record Office, covering 12 closely written folios (Rentals and surv. portf. xxiv, 4).

If the main source of the Massingham name was indeed a simplification of de Massingham, the lack of holders of the surname in Great and Little Massingham itself is less surprising: the inhabitants of these villages who would acquire distinctive locative names would be immigrants from other villages.

The corollary of this is, however, that there is no real reason to postulate that the various early Massingham families in different places were related to each other at all - they simply all came originally from the same part of Norfolk. Moreover, the "de Massinghams" who appear in the surviving records are just the small subset of people who came from the village and who became prominent - most de Massinghams, even those who later, after dropping the "de", became the ancestors of the Massinghams in Morston and Langham, were not prominent enough in 14th and 15th century society to appear in the records we still have from those times. Thus, it is doubtful if the Morston Massinghams are related to those listed in Table 1, even if it were possible to trace their records that far back.

Table 1: Some early records of the (de) Massingham surname

In addition, Walter Rye refers in his Norfolk Families (Goose & Son, 1913) to "Sir John de Thorp, who married Margery de Creyle, is said by Norris (Pedigree, p. 1145) to have descended thus: William Massingham, Lord of Ashwellthorpe and Massingham, father of Roger de Massingham, father of Robert de Massingham, father of Hugh Fitz Robert de Massingham, father of Sir John de Thorp ...".

This Table includes as many early references to (de) Massingham as a surname as I have yet encountered, and covers the period during which surnames became hereditary, but it does not yet claim to be comprehensive. However, I would like to make it so, because of the potential importance of these data for understanding the origin and early distribution of the surname. Further examples are therefore very welcome: please email me at gregharper@wicken.freewire.co.uk. © Greg Harper, 1998, 2002, 2003.

The Norfolk locations of these early de Massingham and Massingham (and minor variants, such as Massyngham) appearances - all the entries recorded in Table 1 - are indicated in Figs. 1a and 1b, which confirms that, even in this early period, the Massingham name is fairly widely scattered, although generally they are to the west of the main centres recorded in 1851-1998 (compare with Fig. 8). McKinley found, for 16th century Norfolk, that most locative surnames were still found within a 10 mile radius of their origin (McKinley, R.A., Norfolk & Suffolk surnames in the Middle Ages; English Surname Series, vol. 2; Phillimore, 1975): Massingham seems to have been rather more mobile.

Fig. 1c extends the mapping of de Massingham to include the rest of the country. This ... ADD HERE

Note need to add GenMap files to collation at end of this htm file

Add new gif files for the maps (as thumbnails)

Fig. 1: Locations of early occurrences of the surname (de) Massingham:

(a) Norfolk, Massingham, pre-1600

(b) Norfolk, de Massingham, pre-1600

(c) England, de Massingham, pre-1600

© Collated by Greg Harper, April 1998 & July 2002

Great Massingham village (abode of John Massyngham, Will 1519-29) is shown in blue; all de Massingham entries are in ADD COLOUR; all pre-1400 Massingham entries (without the "de") are in yellow (and may be predominantly non-hereditary, locative uses of the name); all post-1400 Massingham entries are in red. The 1600 cut-off is arbitrary, as surnames are fully hereditary by then. Circles may refer to more than one person at the same location and at different dates (see Table 1 for details).

4. How many villages did Moessa's people found? How related are the families from these places?

The way that surnames like Massingham started out as indicating where some-one came from, and only later became indicative of their family origins and ancestry, has other implications.

In addition to the Lincolnshire village of Messingham, already referred to from Cameron's book (loc cit), Mills (Oxford Dictionary of English Place Names; loc cit) lists the village of Messing in Essex (between Colchester and Chelmsford), which he describes as the settlement of the family or followers of a man called Maecca (from the Old English personal name + ingas), with the Domesday Book recording the village as Metcinges. The same dictionary also records Mashbury in Essex, as the stronghold of a man called Maessa or Maecca.

There is also a village in North Yorkshire called Masham (west of Thirsk). This may be why the Yorkshire Medieval Data-Bank, containing 350,000 entries mostly between 1086 and 1550 and therefore (see below) not expected (yet) to be a major location of Massingham migrants from Norfolk, contains entries for the surnames Masham, Masseham, Massham, Massyngham, Massingham, Messing, Messingham, Messyngham and others that could be interpreted as related surnames - all dated between 1250 and 1487. The Data-Bank is managed by the York Archaelogical Trust and can be searched, on payment of a fee, for more details (see http://www.yorkarchaeology.co.uk/yfh/index.htm or write to them at Cromwell House, 13 Ogleforth, York YO1 2JG, UK). The results for Massingham and its variants have been abstracted into a Word document that is available from the page entitled Massingham Resources on this web site: click on the link in the panel to the left of this page. The Oxford Dictionary of English Place Names (Mills) interprets Masham as the homestead or village of a man called Maessa. Adrian Room's Dictionary of Place Names reports that Masham was listed as Massam in the Domesday Book, and describes the place-name as indicating Maessa's homestead, with the frequently found combination of a personal name followed by the Old English "ham", meaning homestead or village.

The location of these places are shown on Fig. 2.

Fig. 2 Location of English places associated with the Anglo-Saxon Maessa

© Collated by Greg Harper, April 1999

It is important to limit the range of surnames sensibly regarded as linked genealogically to the Massingham name. The possible connections to the surnames Messingham and Missingham are considered in more detail later in this document. However, there are many other similar names, including Massinger (Messenger), Massingbeard (Massingberd), Massingale (Messingale, Massingall), Measham and its numerous variants, etc. In some cases, these surnames are thought to derive from quite distinct origins: for example, Reaney & Wilson, and others, interpret Messenger as an occupational surname; Massingbeard as derived from a nickname "brazen beard", based on the Old Norse (and modern German) "messing" meaning brass; Measham as a locative name referring back to Measham in Leicestershire; Masham and Massam as a locative name referring back to the North Yorkshire place Masham, etc. The likelihood that people with these surnames are related to those carrying the name Massingham is thus vanishingly small, although, occasionally, a surname might be distorted over time to resemble more closely one that is similar and more familiar to those living in the locality (thus, a fictional Massingham moving to North Yorkshire might have found his name gradually becoming Masham because this was already an established surname in the area).

Even if, as might be the case with the Yorkshire place Masham, the Norfolk Massingham, the Essex Messing and Mashbury, and the Lincolnshire Messingham, there is some distant shared origin of the place-names, the fact that surnames initially referred only to their holders' places of origin (see above) mean that a Massingham from the Norfolk village would be completely unrelated to a Masham from North Yorkshire or a Messingham from Lincolnshire, etc. Finally, to allay the notion that these families might all ultimately derive from some common ancestral Anglo-Saxon, even if he is untraceable, there really is no reason to believe that there was only one Anglo-Saxon called Maessa, Maecca or Moessa who founded all these homesteads and populated them all exclusively with his offspring, any more than there was only one Viking called Eric to populate Greenland or one Norman called William.

Thus, in tracing meaningful genealogical connections, it is crucial to limit them to those with a common surname or one with a reasonably plausible local or temporal variation.

B. METHODS and DATA SOURCES

5.1 Introduction

Several recent developments made the present analyses relatively straightforward:

• The analogous Indexing of the 1851 Census for Norfolk, which was undertaken as a pilot for the full-scale 1881 Census Indexing project.
• The 1881 Census Indexing project, covering the whole of England.
• The analogous Indexing of the 1891 Census for Norfolk, which was undertaken as a pilot for the full-scale 1901 Census Indexing and web-access project.
• (In 2002) The 1901 Census Indexing and web-access project should provide national coverage.
• The availability of nation-wide electronic databases of present-day addresses and telephone numbers.
• The availability of GenMap software for plotting the results of genealogical and similar data in the UK.

5.2 International Genealogical Index (IGI)

An alternative data source for such a study would normally be the IGI. Unfortunately, the IGI’s coverage of Norfolk is particularly poor, and, even at its best, the IGI suffers from two over-riding disadvantages: it is not comprehensive and its data comprise information from a huge range of dates. The IGI is therefore a poor source of data for illustrating the distribution of any name across the country at any given date. Some IGI data can be useful, in an essentially "anecdotal" sense, in illustrating particular points or testing specific hypotheses derived from other data sets.

5.3 Census data

Census data, by contrast, should be as comprehensive as any nationwide exercise can realistically expect to be, and all the data refer to a single date. The 1881 Census Indexing project has greatly facilitated nationwide data collection for this type of study, and work on the Massingham surname, which has remained strongly associated with the county of Norfolk to this day, benefits greatly from Norfolk having been one of a very few counties that were used to pilot the full-scale 1881 Census Indexing project by indexing the 1851 Census. Similarly, the county was chosen to pilot work on making the 1901 Census accessible on-line, by being the subject of a pilot indexing/web-access project using the 1891 Census. Norfolk is therefore unique in being the only English county with 3 (soon 4) Censuses having been fully indexed.

5.4 Present-day datasets

The 1998 Massingham-Messingham-Missingham data was collated by the author from a number of sources, which are described in the Word file attached at the bottom of this WWW page. The telephone book might be regarded as a viable present-day equivalent to a national Census: Rogers (loc cit) has estimated that around 85% of the population has a telephone. However, he also lists the many drawbacks to mapping surnames based on these directories (alone). The most obvious distinction from a true Census is that an entry in the telephone book typically refers to an independent domestic "unit", be that an extended family with grandparents in residence and several children, or an individual living alone. Moreover, an increasing number of people are now ex-directory. Fortunately, a new data source has become available recently (www.192.com), which claims around 40 million entries and which is clearly much more comprehensive in its coverage (frequently listing multiple members of the same family at a family home address). Combining these data with the BT telephone directories and a few other minor sources offers a reasonable prospect of a representative picture of the surname's distribution across the country, even if the absolute numbers are likely to be on the low side.

In spite of this, the 1998 data shown in this document must be regarded as less reliable and less comprehensive than the data collected in the two indexed Censuses, 1851 and 1881.

Some non-systematic updating of the "living Massinghams" database is underway, based largely on individual Massingham family members notifying changes or corrections. These updates have not yet been reflected in this analysis, but they are not expected to make a discernible difference.

C. GEOGRAPHIC DISTRIBUTION of the MASSINGHAM SURNAME

6. Results

The main results of the mappings are illustrated in Figures 3-18.

6.1 Massinghams in Britain in 1881

The majority of Massinghams at the 1881 Census lived in Norfolk (53% of the total in England), and they were particularly clustered in the north of the county with Langham, Field Dalling, Aylmerton and King’s Lynn being the main centres (Figs. 2, 4 and 5). My WWW sites include a fair amount of detailed genealogical data for the Massinghams in these parts of Norfolk - these are branches I consider to be the "core" or "mainstream" Massingham genealogy. There were no Massinghams in Great or Little Massingham itself. Other significant centres were London, especially the East End, Birmingham, and the coastal area between Whitby and Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The attractions of the big conurbations of London and Birmingham are self-evident, with the East End of London (see Fig. 4) being relatively easily accessible down the main Cambridge and Norfolk trunk roads (now the A10 and A11, respectively). The northern centre arose as Norfolk Massinghams migrated in the search for employment and greater prosperity as the agricultural depressions of the 19th century continued to make life difficult in East Anglia. Cleveland and Tyneside were readily reached by sea from the Norfolk ports like Wells and King's Lynn, and there was a long tradition of sea-borne trade between the two regions, though many reportedly travelled on foot. Massinghams known to have moved include Charles Massingham, a miner arrested in 1883 for poaching (Middlesbrough News and Cleveland Advertiser, reported in Directory of Cleveland Ironstone Miners and their Associates, by Peter Tuffs, 1997), and the family of James Massingham, who moved between 1861 and 1873 to become iron miners in the Marske area from Watton in Norfolk, and later emigrated to the New England area of the USA (see other data on this site - clink on the link USA Massinghams in the panel on the left of this page to go to these data).

[Footnote: The notion of relatively recent migration of Massinghams to the North Yorkshire, Durham and Tyneside areas is, perhaps, challenged by the appearance of both Massingham and the older Massyngham spelling in the records of the Yorkshire Medieval Data Bank (see above). Messingham, Messyngham and Messyng entries also appear.]

When the number of Massinghams in each county is expressed per 100,000 population, the distribution in 1881 becomes even more emphatically concentrated on Norfolk (Fig. 3). Most other counties now drop almost to negligible incidences of the name.

Fig. 2: MASSINGHAM distribution, 1881 (Census Index data)

© Collated by Greg Harper, April 1998

Fig. 3: MASSINGHAM distribution, 1881

Census Index data, expressed per 100,000 population

© Collated by Greg Harper, April 1998

Showing the individual towns and villages where Massinghams were living in 1881 (Fig. 4) emphasises even more clearly just how localised the name was at that time; even in Norfolk (see also Fig. 5), the surname is only seen with any degree of frequency in a highly circumscribed part of the county, with very few places containing any large numbers of family members. The corollary of the high Massingham incidence in Langham, Aylmerton and Field Dalling is that the family must have been quite prominent - if only through sheer weight of numbers - in these small villages. King's Lynn was big enough to accommodate a fair number of Massinghams, probably without them appearing unusually numerous, but the population of these few small North Norfolk villages must have held high proportions of Massinghams (and hence a high rate of linkage to the other local families through marriage).

Fig. 4: MASSINGHAM distribution, 1881 (Census Index data)

© Collated by Greg Harper, April 1998

Note on symbols on the "dot maps" in this document: although (except for Fig. 1) the symbol sizes on these maps are proportional to the number of events, they are not all to the same scale - the scaling has been selected for each map to show, as effectively and clearly as possible, the relative numbers of appearances of the surname within each map. Comparisons between maps would have to use the raw data made available in the original GenMap files appended to the foot of this document. If you wish to explore a specific comparison and do not have GenMap, please contact Greg Harper.

Fig. 5: MASSINGHAM distribution in Norfolk, 1881

© Collated by Greg Harper, April 1998

Quite why these particular villages should have become by far the heaviest concentrations of the Massingham surname - and, often, the next village along will have no Massinghams at all - is still a bit of a puzzle. Within the period covered by my own family tree researches, it is relatively easy to trace some of the main migrations, e.g. from Morston to Langham, from Langham to Field Dalling, etc., and these can often be the result of a single couple moving and having a large family with many children surviving into adulthood. However, there are clues to links between some of these centres which suggest that the pattern was not totally random, dictated by the prospects of employment (which must have been fairly consistent across this very rural county until recently), or dictated by the home of future husbands or wives. For example, Stephen Frost Rippingall (1789-1858), related by marriage to the Massinghams, was lord of the manor of Langham but rector of Aylmerton, quite some distance away. Is this is any way connected with the move of Thomas Massingham (1704-1785) from Langham to found the Aylmerton branch of the family, or just coincidence? In earlier times, Sir Thomas Gresham, the great Tudor financier and founder of the Royal Exchange in London, was rewarded by Queen Mary I (so this occurred between 1553 and 1558) with extensive grants of land and property - including the priory of Austin Canons founded by Nicholas de Massingham before 1260 in Great Massingham, and the manors of Langham, Merston (Morston) and Combes (Burgon, Life and Times of Sir Thomas Gresham, 2 volumes (1839) quoted in the Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, London). Whether the family had links to the Norfolk village of Gresham, about a mile from Aylmerton, I don't know. Coincidences, or a stimulus to movement, perhaps of agricultural labourers working on the estates of a single landowner and allowed to move around to reap the harvest?

6.2 Massinghams in Britain in 1998

By 1998, the Massingham surname has become somewhat more numerous. The 1881 Census includes 495 Massinghams, whereas the 1998 dataset - which is likely to be significantly less comprehensive than a Census - contains 676 Massinghams. The extent of the under-reporting in the 1998 dataset might be estimated from noting that the population of England & Wales increased from 25.974 million in 1881 to around 49.890 million in 1991 (UK Office of National Statistics Census Reports, abstracted in Whitaker's Almanac, 1996), which is a 92% increase, compared to the 37% increase in those found with Massingham as their surname. Although Norfolk showed a lower population increase than many other parts of the country, the disparity between these two 1881-1998 rates of increase probably owes more to the incompleteness of the accessible Massingham dataset in the latter year.

By 1998, the Massingham name has spread much more widely across the country than in 1881 (Fig. 6), though with very few appearing outside England. The main centres in 1998 are reasonably well presaged from the 1881 dataset - with strong representation in Northumberland, Durham and Yorkshire (see below), and a perhaps derivative presence in Lincolnshire (the direct land route between the northern counties and Norfolk). The Essex Massinghams may have derived in part from those found in previous eras in the East End of London, with London itself having many fewer Massinghams in 1998 (22 entries) than in 1881 (53 entries), and with a much more diffuse spread across the greatly enlarged capital boundaries (compare Fig. 7 with Fig. 4). The 1998 foci in Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire are less readily predicted from 1881.

Fig. 6: MASSINGHAM distribution, 1998

The 22 London Massinghams are not shown on this pre-1974 county representation.

© Collated by Greg Harper, April 1998

Both the 1881 and the 1998 maps show a surprising paucity of Massinghams in Suffolk and Cambridgeshire, although both might be expected to "acquire" Massinghams through low distance migration from Norfolk. This might be rationalised by the main Massingham centres in Norfolk being so deeply "buried" in the north of the county that "strays" into adjacent counties were rare. More purposeful, and almost inevitably longer distance migration (the adjacent counties are also predominantly agricultural and hence would offer little gain over Norfolk when seeking employment), seems to be the main mode of Massingham spread during the last century.

The GenMap software includes a facility for calculating the incidence of a surname in the 1881 Census per 100,000 population, and this was used to generate Fig. 3. The same facility is not available for other raw data inputs, so it is not possible to generate the equivalent "density" map for the 1998 Massingham data. However, doing the same calculation manually (Table 2), in spite of the significant caveats described in the footnote to the Table, shows that Norfolk continues to be by far the most concentrated location for the Massingham surname, albeit far less emphatically than was the case in 1881 (in 1881, 53% of all Massingham entries were in Norfolk; by 1998, only 24% of the national total are in Norfolk).

Table 2: Numbers of Massinghams in 1998 for each pre-1974 county, expressed per 100,000 population

* These calculations (and Figs. 6, 7, 9, 16 and 17) are complicated by the revisions to the county boundaries in 1974, and again in 1996 onwards. In line with usual genealogical practice, I have largely ignored the new 1974 counties and metropolitan councils. However, this makes it difficult to determine the frequency with which Massingham appears in the counties marked with an asterisk. The population of Cumbria has been matched with the Massinghams in Cumberland (as there are no Massinghams in Westmoreland); the population of Cleveland has been matched with the Massinghams in Durham (though this is clearly inaccurate in that it ignores the North Yorkshire component - see Fig. 7); the combined populations of Gloucestershire, Avon and Somerset have been matched with the combined Massinghams in pre-1974 Gloucestershire and Somerset, although the majority are clearly in Somerset (Fig. 7); the calculation for Lancashire has used the county population (excluding Merseyside) and the 12 non-Liverpudlian Massinghams; Humberside has been ignored in calculating the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire numbers; no calculations have been attempted for London and Middlesex because of the ambiguities of defining counties in the capital; the population of Tyne & Wear has been matched with the Massinghams in Northumberland (see Fig. 7, but see Fig. 9); the populations of East and West Sussex have been combined to match with the Massinghams in the pre-1974 county; the calculation for Warwickshire has ignored the West Midlands conurbation as most of the Massinghams live in the rural county; the population of Hereford and Worcester has been matched with the Massinghams in Worcestershire (as there are no Massinghams in Herefordshire); and the population of South Yorkshire has been matched with the Massinghams in the old county of Yorkshire (see Fig. 7, but this ignores the errors introduced by Cleveland, York and West Yorkshire occurrences of the surname). To aid comparability with Fig. 3, the numbers per 100,000 population have been rounded to the the nearest integer.

Another way of looking at the trends over the last century is to determine the ratio between the number of Massinghams in each county in 1998 to the Massingham population in 1881. This calculation (Table 3) does not take into account general population trends (remember England & Wales' total population rose by 92% between 1881 and 1991) , but it does indicate the "centres of attraction" (green) and the main loss centres (red) for the Massingham surname.

Table 3: Changes in Massingham numbers between 1881-1998 for each pre-1974 county

These calculations again ignore the new 1974 counties and metropolitan councils.

The 1998 map by individual town and village (Fig. 7) confirms the greater spread of the surname across the country.Although there are still marked clusters, there are also many places scattered more generally across England, and substantial new clusters in places like South Yorkshire, Liverpool and an extensive, probably commuter-related, belt around London.

Fig. 7: MASSINGHAM distribution, 1998

(the two appearances of the surname in Scotland have been omitted from this map)

© Collated by Greg Harper, April 1998

The influence of modern living patterns is evident in the larger-scale 1998 Massingham map for Norfolk (Fig. 8). The main centres of King's Lynn and Norwich have maintained or enhanced their concentration of family members, with a marked relative depletion from the Langham/Field Dalling area, and from Aylmerton, towards the towns between Cromer and Sheringham. It is reasonable to hypothesise that a number of the more easterly centres are dormitory bases for commuting into Norwich.

Fig. 8: MASSINGHAM distribution in Norfolk, 1998

© Collated by Greg Harper, April 1998

The Cleveland and Tyneside Massinghams (Fig. 9) form the second largest group in 1998, after Norfolk - Durham, Northumberland and Yorkshire together contain 142 Massingham entries in the database, though there is a sizeable contribution from the South Yorkshire conurbations. The modern (now defunct) counties of Cleveland and Tyne & Wear have 68 Massingham entries between them. Clearly, the 19th century northward migrations of Massinghams from Norfolk to the coal and iron-mining, and other heavy industrial centres, has left a substantial legacy of Massinghams. Interestingly, Hull (and Humberside generally), a place where some of my Massingham ancestors are known to have gone, proved only a weak or temporary attraction - there is no concentration of Massinghams in the area in either 1881 or 1998.

Fig. 9: 1998 Massinghams in Cleveland and Tyneside

© Collated by Greg Harper, April 1998

6.3 Massinghams in Norfolk in 1851, 1881, 1891 and 1998

Norfolk is fortunate in that the 1851 Census for the whole county was indexed as a pilot study for the England-wide 1881 exercise. Fig. 10 is thus able to show the county-wide distribution of the Massinghams. The main centres familiar from the 1881 Census - Langham, King's Lynn, Field Dalling and Aylmerton were already established by 1851, and Massinghams again fail to appear in either Great or Little Massingham.

Fig. 10: MASSINGHAM distribution in Norfolk, 1851 Census Index

© Collated by Greg Harper, April 1998

Similarly, the county's 1891 Census has been indexed as a pilot for the national 1901 indexing and web-access project, so Fig. 11 is able to show a fairly reliable and comprehensive  distribution of Massinghams in Norfolk in 1891. By 1891, the relative preponderance of Field Dalling as the main Massingham centre has been accentuated - over 25% of the county's Massinghams were in this one village.

Fig. 11: MASSINGHAM distribution in Norfolk, 1891 Census Index

© Collated by Greg Harper, May 2001

Comparing the 4 profiles for Massinghams in Norfolk - 1851, 1881, 1891 and 1998 - together is instructive but including all the data on one map prevents the trends from being clearly seen. The following maps are therefore attempts to see various combinations of the data to make trends more readily discernible.

Fig. 12 shows all 4 years' data side-by-side to a common quantitative scale. Figs. 13-17 are various pairs (or a triplet) of datasets compared. As the numbers shown are absolute, normal population growth might be expected to create larger numbers of Massinghams in the later Censuses (the yellow circles should be larger than the green circles, and the latter should be larger than the pink ones). However, the total population Norfolk only grew from a total of 442,714 in 1851 to 444,825 in 1881 (Census data quoted in White's Norfolk Directory, 1883) - an almost negligible 0.5% increase - while, by 1891, the county's total population was ...., so widespread increases in the numbers of Massinghams are unlikely.

Fig. 12: MASSINGHAM migration in Norfolk, 1851-1998

© Collated by Greg Harper, May 2001

Fig. 13: MASSINGHAM migration in Norfolk, 1851 cf. 1881

Census Index entries (1851: pink and 1881: green)

© Collated by Greg Harper, May 2001

Fig. 14: MASSINGHAM migration in Norfolk, 1881 cf. 1891

Census Index entries (1881: green and 1891: yellow)

© Collated by Greg Harper, May 2001

Fig. 15: MASSINGHAM migration in Norfolk, 1891 cf. 1998

Census Index entries (1891: yellow) and 1998 database (blue)

© Collated by Greg Harper, May 2001

Fig. 16: MASSINGHAM migration in Norfolk, 1851 cf. 1891

Census Index entries (1851: pink and 1891: yellow)

© Collated by Greg Harper, May 2001

Fig. 17: MASSINGHAM migration in Norfolk, 1851-1998

Census Index entries (1851: pink and 1881: green) and 1998 database (blue)

© Collated by Greg Harper, April 1998

There are only modest changes between the 3 Census dates, 40 years apart, although a more marked shift towards Norwich (and a fragmentation of the Massingham centres generally) is apparent in 1998 (probably largely due to 20^th century urbanisation). The geographic shift may also be accentuated by adding Figs. 1 to the comparison series - the progressive eastward trend is actually quite marked. However, even in North Norfolk, the name is rare enough that a single family moving into or away from a village could easily cause quite substantial changes - including the complete disappearance of the Massingham name between 1851 and 1881 from Blakeney, Salthouse and Terrington, among others (only the first of these regains a Massingham presence by 1891). The main growth centres between 1851 and 1881 were Langham and, less markedly, Field Dalling, with significant wholly new Massingham centres evident by 1881 in Bodham, Fulmodeston, Guestwick, Foulsham (later to emigrate to the USA), Grimston, Saxlingham and Felbrigg. By 1891, Fulmodeston, Grimston and Saxlingham are no longer represented, though Field Dalling is now the largest single Massingham centre. Swardeston appears for the first time in 1891, but does not persist in 1998. Watton, so important in terms of the migration path to North Yorkshire and thence to the USA, peaks as a Massingham centre in 1851.

The overall impression, comparing the 4 sets of data, is that there was a migration away from the northern coastal focus in 1851 to create more Massingham centres that were further inland, but the trend is hardly dramatic and the stability over 150 years is actually quite remarkable.

6.4 Massinghams in Norfolk before 1851

There are no reasonably comprehensive and readily accessible datasets before 1851 to support a rigorous analysis but the 1851 Census data can be re-used to give an approximate indication of the mobility of the previous generation. Plotting the places of birth of those in Norfolk at the 1851 Census (Fig. 18) covers a range of dates from 1775-1831, if only those at least 20 years of age in 1851 (i.e. adults) are included, to provide a nominal earlier generation. This admittedly skewed sample (with non-Norfolk births being excluded) shows some evidence of being more tightly focused around the main North Norfolk centres (plus King’s Lynn) in the earlier generation.

Fig. 18: Places of birth of 1851 Norfolk Massinghams aged 20 or older

Births pre-1800 are shown in pink, those 1801-1831 are in yellow.

© Collated by Greg Harper, April 1998

D. GEOGRAPHIC DISTRIBUTION of the MESSINGHAM SURNAME

7.1 Messinghams in Britain in 1881

This surname is both rarer overall, and differently distributed, than Massingham (Fig. 19), with the majority of counties showing no Messinghams at all. Very few counties have both Massinghams and Messinghams (Table 4). The 1891 Census Index for Norfolk contains 1 Messingham - which might well be an enumerator, transcription or indexing error.

Fig. 19: MESSINGHAM distribution, 1881 (Census Index data)

© Collated by Greg Harper, April 1998

Table 4: Massingham and Messingham coincidence in 1881 and 1998

Data for counties for which there are both Massingham and Messingham entries in the year shown are in the unshaded areas.

When the Messinghams are expressed per 100,000 population (Fig. 20), only Hampshire and Sussex show anything above a very low baseline, and even they are sparse centres for the surname.

Fig. 20: MESSINGHAM distribution, 1881

Census Index data, expressed per 100,000 population

© Collated by Greg Harper, April 1998

Looking at a higher resolution than the county "fill" maps (Fig. 21), it is clear that virtually all the Messinghams can be accommodated within only a couple of very localised foci. This may be easier to rationalise as an "aberrant" local spelling for an essentially Massingham ancestry: a truly distinctive family might be expected to be more widely spread by 1881, when mobility was fairly high due to the industrial revolution, the urbanisation of much of the population, and other economic pressures requiring migration in search of new jobs.

Fig. 21: MESSINGHAM distribution, 1881 (Census Index data)

© Collated by Greg Harper, April 1998

Another surprising feature of the Messingham surname distribution is its very poor correlation with the place Messingham in North Lincolnshire (Humberside). In 1881, none of the English Messinghams appear in Lincolnshire (although there were 18 Massinghams), and, even in 1998, the county has only 4 recorded Messinghams, just over 5% of the national total (in contrast to 34 Massinghams). The Hampshire-Sussex concentration of the name is very difficult to reconcile with the postulated locative origin of the surname (see Introduction). There is no evidence to link the surname with the closely analogous Messing place-name, in Essex.

Although, as noted above, the International Genealogical Index (IGI) is not an effective representative dataset for studying the geographic distribution of these surnames, it provides some additional data, including information for earlier times, and the pattern on non-Massingham variants is informative (see Table 5). Thus, the numerous Linconshire entries in the IGI are exclusively Massinghams (or minor variants still based on the "-a-" component) and they continue the absence of Messinghams seen in the 1881 Census, which, as they extend back to about 1600, seems to argue against a switch from a Messingham locative to a more standardised Massingham in conformity with the Norfolk group, unless it happened during or soon after the earlier formalisation and hereditisation of surnames. Secondly, virtually none of these names and their variants appear in Norfolk, the Massingham epicentre. Thirdly, the extensive overlap of places recording Missingham and Messingham entries (shown in bold magenta in Table 4) implies a facile exchange may have operated between the two names. Finally, the 1881 Census data pointing to a South-East England focus for the surname Messingham are reinforced by the admittedly almost "anecdotal" evidence of the IGI.

Table 5: IGI occurrences of the Massingham surname and similar names

The 1994 edition of the IGI on CD-ROM, version 3.05, was used as the basis of this analysis. Although more recent versions of the IGI will have added significant numbers of entries, and possibly extended the range of parishes relevant to the Massinghams in the Index, it is unlikely that the insights drawn from the 1994 dataset will have qualitatively changed.

The lack of evidence for a locative surname based on Messingham in Lincolnshire, in contrast to the wealth of evidence for the Massingham surname to be assigned as a Norfolk locative, is intriguing, and the reasons for the difference between the 2 names are unclear. In an earlier era, both villages were in the Danelaw, and so presumably experienced the same influences that introduced typically Scandinavian-derived surnames in the north of England: it is difficult to consider that Messingham was pressurised out as a surname but survived as a place-name, while Massingham hung on in both regards. Whether the dramatic casualty rates associated with the Black Death and similar epidemics just happened to wipe out the Lincolnshire Messinghams at a critical stage in surname formalisation, while Massingham survived, is also unknown. At present, therefore, the curious geographic distribution of the Messingham surname remains unexplained.

7.2 Messinghams in Britain in 1998

As for the Massinghams, the Messinghams were, by 1998 (Fig. 22), more widely distributed than in 1881, although the shift is, in some ways and in spite of the continued rarity of the Messingham name (only around 1/10^th as frequently as Massingham), more substantial for the surname Messingham. Thus, as well as the "northward creep" into Berkshire, Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire from counties where Messinghams already appeared in 1881 (probably influenced by the commuter belt around London), the 1998 dataset shows a contiguous band (albeit sparsely populated) across Lancashire, Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, whereas these counties had no Messinghams in 1881. The Lancashire and Yorkshire appearances might be due to their high overall populations, or to the industrial pull in the 19th century. Neither explanation holds firmly for Lincolnshire, and a more plausible overall explanation is evident from Fig. 23, where the Messinghams are seen to cluster around Humberside and so appear in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. Again, this presents an interesting contrast to the Massinghams, who show little or no concentration around Humberside (see Figs. 4 and 7).

Fig. 22: MESSINGHAM distribution, 1998

© Collated by Greg Harper, April 1998

Fig. 23: MESSINGHAM distribution, 1998

© Collated by Greg Harper, April 1998

What is especially striking about the 1998 distribution of the Messinghams is its westward shift: in 1881, Sussex had the most Messinghams, with strong "diffusion" into adjacent Hampshire and Kent, and an appreciable spill-over into Essex. By 1998, the "epicentre" was emphatically Hampshire, with no Messinghams in Kent or Essex. However, looking at the towns and villages where the Messinghams lived in 1881 (Fig. 21) and live now (Fig. 23), the shift is perhaps more readily seen as expansions around the older main centres, with the inevitable associated spread of locations causing the county balance to shift. Note that, for Sussex, 1881 saw 22 Messinghams and no Massinghams, whereas, by 1998, Massingham had become marginally the more common name (15 Massinghams to 13 Messinghams; see Table 4). The county shows quite a rigorous divide between the 2 names in 1998 (compare Figs. 7 and 23), with the Massingham influx being in the western side of the county, suggesting that the apparent "switch" from Messingham to Massingham is probably not due to a real change of spelling in the established Messingham foci, but rather to a de novo influx of Massinghams elsewhere.

Table 6: Massingham and Messingham in key English counties - a summary

Note that, even in its main Hampshire and Sussex centres, Messingham has become a less frequent name (per 100,000 population) in 1998 than it was in 1881 (Table 6), although the under-counting in the 1998 dataset might cancel out this apparent trend. The Messingham concentrations in either 1881 or 1998 (maximally 4 per 100,000 population) do not begin to approach the high relative frequencies seen for Massingham in Norfolk (21-59 per 100,000 population).

The surname Messingham appears in the USA, almost certainly as the result of Messingham and Massingham emigration from the UK, although it is conceivable that the name was also chosen as a direct anglicisation of some other Germanic names. Similarly, there are Messinghams in Australia, again likely to be descendants of English Messinghams, but possibly also of English Massinghams.

E. GEOGRAPHIC DISTRIBUTION of the MISSINGHAM SURNAME

8.1 Mossingham and Mussingham

The IGI includes a few references to Mussingham (see Table 5, above). As far as my researches have extended, Mossingham does not seem to have been used as a surname, and the extreme rarity or absence of Mossingham and Mussingham would seem to allow their deletion from the list of names warranting serious consideration in the present analysis.

8.2 Missingham

There are no Missinghams in the 1851 Census Index for Norfolk (or, for that matter, for Devon or Warwickshire, the other 2 counties whose 1851 Census datasets were indexed and published on searchable CD-ROM by the LDS Church). There are also no Missinghams in the 1891 Census Index for Norfolk.

There are 4 Missinghams in the 1881 Census Index for England, all in Yorkshire and all in one family, whose origins were unfortunately recorded by the original Census enumerator as unknown.

There are only 2 Missinghams in the 1998 UK database, less than 0.3% of the total for Massingham, Messingham and Missingham. This contrasts with the 90 Missinghams I have found from the Australian telephone directories available on the WWW alone (and note the marked under-estimate this is likely to be because the directories exclude unlisted numbers and usually list only the head of the household, rarely a couple and never any children). The population of the UK is around 58.4 million (1994 estimate from the UK Office of National Statistics, on www.ons.gov.uk), whereas that of Australia is 18.6 million (September 1997 estimate, Australian Bureau of Statistics on www.abs.gov.au), so the difference in the incidence of the Missingham name is even more marked when expressed per 100,000 population - a 140-fold difference in the relative incidence of the surname between the 2 countries. Assuming that this surname appeared in Australia through emigration from the UK, which is reasonable given the Old English derivation of the name, it is tempting to speculate that Missingham is a local variant that arose through a shift in the pronunciation of an original Massingham or Messingham import. One Missingham family subsequently found in England certainly originated in Australia, with the father emigrating to the UK in 1961, and having at least one of his children in London (Internet posting from Peter Missingham, CAS Netlink WWW Board 25 November 1997). Evidence exists (see Table 5) that Missingham and Messingham may have been interchangeable in England. There is certainly evidence of Massingham-Messingham interchangeability in Australia, just as in the UK and North America (see below). However, I have no proof that this is the origin of the Missingham name.

There are a few scattered references to Missingham in other parts of the world, such as New Zealand and Canada, but not sufficient to contribute greatly to any clearer insights into the origins of the surname.

These 4 datasets - 1851, 1881, 1891 and 1998 - which can claim at least a degree of representativeness of some regional or national populations - would suggest that the name Missingham has become more widespread over the years, which might indeed suggest that it is a variant introduced by local usage, rather than a surname firmly founded in history. However, this hypothesis is contradicted by two sets of data that are certainly not even in their coverage, but indicate a much earlier origin of the Missingham name. Firstly, the IGI contains several references to the name, or its variants (see Table 5 above), although these have not been checked back against the original records to ensure they are not transcription errors. Secondly, and with some overlap with the IGI entries, a number of Missinghams have been found in the "Surrey Super Index" of Surrey parish registers made available on the WWW by the West Surrey Family History Society (http://www.surreyweb.org.uk/wsfhs/index.html). All the entries found (summarised in Table 7) pre-date the Census, and the absence of Surrey Missinghams by the 1881 Census suggest that migration, standardisation of surnames (including better recording accuracy as literacy improved) or simple petering out of minor family lines led to the gradual loss of the surname over the intervening years. Fig. 24 shows the various places listed in the West Surrey FHS index and the IGI with Missingham entries. This map does not attempt to show the numbers of incidences of the surname at each place, but indicates that the surname seems highly localised to the Surrey-Hampshire border.

Table 7: Missingham, Massingham and Messingham in West Surrey FHS's "Surrey Super Index"

C = christenings, M = marriages, B = burials. Entries in the Table (and WWW index) refer to separate indexes prepared for the parishes and dates shown; there is no greater significance in the date spans chosen. Many of the indices themselves are available at the Society of Genealogists, as well as from the West Surrey FHS.

Fig. 24: MISSINGHAM distribution (IGI and some Surrey parish registers)

Red circles show the places with Missingham entries in the Surrey parish registers indexed by the West Surrey FHS; blue circles show the places in the IGI with Missingham entries (see also Table 5).

© Collated by Greg Harper, April 1999

F. MASSINGHAM, MESSINGHAM & MISSINGHAM: VARIANTS or SEPARATE SURNAMES?

9.1 Messingham as a derivative of Massingham

Yet rarer still are the potential variants Missingham and Mussingham. To date, I have found no mention of the spelling Mossingham. One of the questions that the mapping studies described in this document hoped to address was whether Messingham is a truly distinctive surname, or "merely" an unusual variant of the dominant spelling, Massingham (see below for further discussion).

The mapping data don’t throw much unequivocal light on the question of whether we should regard Messingham and Missingham as spelling variants of Massingham or as distinctive surnames in their own right, but a few inferences can be drawn.

It is reasonable to postulate that Messingham and Massingham were both originally locative surnames, and that the people in the 13th-15th centuries who adopted these place-names as surnames, and subsequently as hereditary surnames, were entirely unrelated to each other. Where Missingham originated from is more difficult to surmise.

The IGI data then suggest that, when dealing with the next phase of history, it is tenable to regard Missingham and Messingham as interchangeable, with the pair being quite distinct from Massingham. Perhaps Missingham was only a variant of the locative Messingham. Over time, Messingham would seem to have become the more usual form of this pair, though this is more of an impression than the result of detailed and comprehensive quantitative study. More recently, the Missingham surname seems to carry a strongly Australian imprint, suggestive of a local modification of an original Massingham and/or Messingham import.

There are then two "problems" to face when considering the Messingham name: its relative rarity, compared to the Massinghams, and its odd geographic distribution, away from its likely locative origins in Lincolnshire. The absence of Messingham as a surname in Messingham, Lincolnshire, itself is no more surprising than the absence of Massingham in the Norfolk villages of the same name: distinctive locative surnames are more likely to be used for immigrants from other villages. Nevertheless, we might still expect Messingham as a surname to appear predominantly around Messingham, thus predominantly in Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire and other parts of Lincolnshire. Instead, it appears predominantly in the south-east of England.

The lack of Messinghams centred geographically around Messingham in Lincolnshire contrasts very strongly with the clear persistence of the North Norfolk focus for the surname Massingham, even if Great and Little Massingham themselves do not feature. This is not simply due to the two place-names referring to villages of substantially different size, which might mean that Thomas from Messingham was substantially more or less frequent an appellation than Thomas from Massingham. Messingham had a total population in the 1870's of 1110 (White's 1872 Lincolnshire Directory), while the populations of Great and Little Massingham were 885 and 147, respectively (1881 Census data quoted in White's 1883 Norfolk Directory), a total of 1032, almost identical to Messingham's size. In present times, the populations are Messingham 2956 (North Lincolnshire Council data), Great Massingham ... and Little Massingham ... There are no reasons to believe that any of these villages has experienced abnormally rapid growth or rapid shrinkage at any time in their histories, so as to render more distant historical projections based on their 1881 or 1998 populations as wildly misleading. Nor, as far as I am aware, have any other unusual events occurred in Messingham or Massingham to distort their surname profiles or other relevant influences. So the "numerical" impetus to create a penumbra of Massinghams and Messinghams in nearby villages might be expected to be about the same.

Even if migration from Messingham was more widespread and/or complete than migration from Massingham, it should simply create a strong Messingham surname concentration elsewhere in the country, or an approximately equal total number of family members more diffusely scattered. The Hampshire-Sussex centre is much weaker than this mechanism should generate, and the pull from Lincolnshire to these distant (and still predominantly agricultural/rural) counties would not be expected to be unusually strong. Nor is there an obvious reason to expect such a difference in centrifugal factors between Messingham and Massingham, since both villages were small, primarily agricultural, and about as far from their nearest urban centres (King’s Lynn for Massingham, Scunthorpe and Hull for Messingham) that might be the main migratory attraction.

We are thus left with accepting that Messingham generally became a less frequent name than Massingham, but without any insight into why this happened. If it happened only through accidents of birthrates and other such influences, then it would indicate that the 2 surnames should be regarded as truly distinctive to this day. If, however, Messingham has become less frequent because it has often been transformed into Massingham (for whatever reasons), then there will be Massingham family lines that are actually unrelated to each other - those whose origins are Messingham and those whose origins are genuinely Massingham. This is clearly of significant genealogical importance and a potential source of confusion. The reasons for interchangeability can be many and varied - if, say, people, knowing of the surname Massingham, heard the name Messingham, they might use the more familiar name (and spelling) for the newcomers, thereby progressively diluting out the immigrant name (this seems to have happened in the reverse direction for Henry Massingham's family when they moved to Surrey). For this to deal to a preferential loss of the Messingham name would, however, have to require an unexplained bias. Neither family seems to have thrown up a prominent notable whose example or familiarity might be expected to skew the usage of their name in the general population. The Hampshire-Sussex node of Messinghams might represent a local switch from Massingham.

Nevertheless, there is indeed evidence that individuals used both Massingham and Messingham as their surname, or that those around them called them by both names (Table 8), and the evidence seems to favour the gradual emergence of Massingham as the dominant form. However, this is far from being an unequivocal picture, and it is difficult to be convinced that we are not just seeing a patchy representation of a two-way interchangeability. Although interchangeability could certainly confound the tracing of reliable family trees, it is the imbalanced risk that some Massinghams are actually transformed Messinghams that poses the greater threat of genealogical artefacts.

Table 8: Examples of individuals using both Massingham and Messingham surnames

G. SUMMARY of the MAIN CONCLUSIONS

10.1 That Massingham is a locative name derived from the villages of Great and Little Massingham in Norfolk seems beyond doubt: the name’s concentration in Norfolk was emphatic in 1851 and 1881 and this still remains quite strongly the case today.

10.2 Massingham remains a rare surname, with a strong presence in the Cleveland and Tyneside regions due to migration from Norfolk in the 19th century. Bcause of the close focus of the Massinghams within a few North Norfolk villages even as late as 1851, it is reasonable to suppose that the majority of present-day Massinghams able to trace their ancestry back to Norfolk will indeed be related to each other. However, it is far from impossible for distinct de Massinghams in the 14th century to have founded still-extant family trees that will always be separate, only converging back in the untraceable past and then only by dint of their common origin in the same Massingham villages, not through blood-relatedness.

10.3 Messingham was presumably also a locative surname, based on Messingham in Lincolnshire, but there was no remaining evidence for this locative epicentre by the time of the 1881 Census. Rather, by 1881, and still in 1998, the Messingham surname concentrated in south-east England, especially Sussex and Hampshire, for reasons that are still entirely unclear.

10.4 Messingham is a far rarer name than Massingham, and there are hints that this may be partly due to an imbalanced interchangeability of the two names leading to a progressive transfer of some Messinghams into Massinghams. This would suggest that great care is needed in tracing some of these lines, where an apparently Massingham lineage may be artefactual. However, the data are not extensive enough to be definitive, and, at present, the best course of action would seem to be to accept unambiguous evidence of a Massingham link but to be very cautious about hypothesising back from a Massingham lineage that seems to be predominantly Messingham in earlier times: such branches may prove to be entirely unrelated to the true Massingham family tree.

10.5 Missingham would seem to have been a local variant of Messingham, and rarely interchangeable with Massingham. Missingham has barely survived as an English surname, but it has reached significant numbers in Australia. It is suggested that this occurred because of a local transformation from a Messingham or Massingham import.

H. AVAILABILITY of SOURCE DATA FILES

The 1851 and 1881 Census data are available from the Public Record Office in London and many other libraries and genealogy societies; these data are not available from this web site. The 1891 Census data are/were available on the PRO's web site for 3 months (expiring on 31 July 2001): the Massingham entries and (one) Messingham entry were abstracted into a Word document that you can download from the page Massingham Resources on this web site, which you can reach by clicking the link in the panel to the left of this page. The 1998 UK Massingham-Messingham-Missingham database used in this analysis was prepared by the author. The raw data sources are described in this file: this is a Microsoft Word97 file, compressed using WinZip. If you need software to unzip this compressed format, or to read Word97 documents, go to my Freewire site (click on the link at the top of this page) for pointers to the relevant downloads. As with all genealogial materials on my WWW sites, you are free to copy, print and share the 1998 database provided you acknowledge my authorship. Please do not abuse the availability of the database by using it for mass mailings of commercial materials. I welcome corrections, comments and contacts from other genealogists sharing an interest in the Massingham family tree.

My Freewire site (click on the link at the top of this page) also contains a pointer to Steve Archer's GenMap software home page: I would highly recommend this invaluable tool. If you have GenMap on your computer, you are welcome to use the GenMap files that are compressed into this zip file. Once unzipped, you should find the following GenMap files (the hyperlinks listed also enable you to download each GenMap file individually):

• Early Massingham surname references in earlyma.gmp
• Locations of English place-names associated with Maessa in maessa.gmp
• Massingham places of birth pre-1831 in manfto31.gmp
• Massinghams in Norfolk in 1851 (Census) in ma51nfk.gmp
• Massinghams in England in 1881 (Census) in ma1881.gmp
• Massinghams in Norfolk in 1891 (Census) in ma1891.gmp
• Massinghams in Britain in 1998 (database) in ma1998.gmp
• Massinghams in Norfolk in 1998 (database) in ma98nfk.gmp
• Massinghams in Norfolk in 1851 (Census), 1881 (Census), 1891 (Census) and 1998 (database) in m5198nfk.gmp
• Messinghams in England in 1881 (Census) in me1881.gmp
• Messinghams in England in 1998 (database) in me1998.gmp
• Missingham locations in England in the IGI and West Surrey FHS Super Surrey Index in miIGIsy.gmp

Please note that the GenMap software has one or two drawbacks for the present purposes: (i) there is no facility to export the maps, so the maps included in this WWW document were generated with screen-capture software, and they may therefore lose some of the original resolution and quality; (ii) each GenMap file can only be saved with a single map format, and the map on the screen is not entirely WYSIWYG compared to the map that prints out (and hence the map that is created by the screen-capture software). The latter point means that, if you open one of the above GenMap files, the map that appears may not look exactly like those shown in this document. You may need to alter the format to reproduce the layouts I have chosen to illustrate my discussion.

© Greg Harper, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001

To go to other pages on this Massingham/Messingham/Missingham genealogy site, click on one of the links in the panel on the left-hand side of the screen.

To go to my other genealogy web sites, click on one of the links in the panel at the top of the screen. My Freewire site provides an orientation guide that will help you determine which site you need.