- Jones (surname)
Family name
name = Jones
caption=
pronunciation =
meaning = Derived from "Son of John"
region = England
origin = English
related names =
footnotes =Jones is a popular
family name of English origin that comes from the term "son of John". It is one of the most common surnames in the English speaking world.__TOC__
History
The Jones surname was first documented in
1279 inHuntingdonshire ,England . [ [http://www.jonesgenealogy.com/archive/jones-family-name-history.asp Jones Family Name History ] ] [Reaney & Wilson, p256 (under "John")] Its popularity in Wales stems from the use of "Ioan" in the Welsh Authorised Version of the Bible. "Ioan" is used here for "Ieuan", the Welsh form of "John". [Reaney & Wilson, p256.]In 1813-1841, there were about 85,000 people named Jones living in England (0.43% of the population) and about 145,000 people named Jones living in Wales (13.84% of the total population) [ [http://home.clara.net/tirbach/HelpPagepearls.html#Surnames Surnames] ] [ [http://homepage.ntlworld.com/hitch/gendocs/pop.html#EW England & Wales] ] [ [http://www.statistics.gov.uk/census2001/bicentenary/pdfs/wales.pdf Wales] ] By 1881, migration to the urban centres of England had equalised the numbers so that both countries had a little over 163,000 people named Jones recorded in the census of that year. [ [http://www.familysearch.org/Eng/Search/frameset_search.asp?PAGE=census/search_census.asp 1881 census] ] Even so, it shows some areas of North Wales still had very high proportions of people carrying the name, for example in "Sir Feirionnydd" (Merionethshire) 23.6% and "Sir Gaernarfon" (Caernarfonshire) 22.3% were named Jones compared with 10.4% in Wales as a whole and 0.67% in England. Other, more readily identifiable Welsh names, such as Lloyd and Price (from "ap Rhys"), had greater proportions of their numbers living in England than Wales in 1881 - this may be because of the relatively higher concentrations of Jones in Welsh speaking areas.
It is likely that a number of Afro-Caribbean and African-American Joneses got their names from freed slaves adopting the names of the estate managers or owners. [Cruickshank, 'Liberated Africans,' p. 78] [John Thornton, 'Central African Names and African-American Naming Patterns' - 'The William and Mary Quarterly', 3rd Series, 50, 4(October 1993): 728, 730, 733-739.]
Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
According to the [http://www.nationaltrustnames.org.uk/Statistics.aspx?name=JONES&year=1998&altyear=1881&country=GB&type=name National Trust surname profiler] "Jones" is the second most numerous surname in the UK. There were 391,909 Joneses on the UK electoral register in 1998. This represents a rate of 10,521 Joneses per million Britons or just over 1% of the population. The proportion of Joneses in other Anglophone countries is slightly lower: the 2002 rate in Australia was 6,548 per million; Canada, 3,882 per million; and 2002 New Zealand, 5,499 per million. This name is much rarer in the Republic of Ireland with a rate of only 144 per million in 2003. National Trust information for the United States places the 1990 rate at 8,334 per million (0.83%) based on telephone directory records; [Citation: National Trust, 2007] the 1990 United States census provides a frequency of 0.62%, providing an overall rank of 4th most frequent (following Williams and preceding Brown). [Citation: United States Census Bureau, 1995.]
ee also
*
List of people with surname Jones
*Keeping up with the Joneses Notes
References
* cite web |url= http://www.nationaltrustnames.org.uk/Statistics.aspx?name=JONES&year=1998&altyear=1881&country=GB&type=name
title= Jones: Frequency and Ethnicity |accessdate= 2008-02-25
last= Longley |first= Paul |coauthors= Alex Singleton, Richard Webber and Daryl Lloyd
work= [http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/news/newsStory.asp?ID=151 SPLINT Project, University College London]
publisher=The National Trust
* National Trust, 2007. " [http://www.nationaltrustnames.org.uk/help/HelpComparison.htm What do the statistics in the geographical location and social demographic tables mean?] "
*United States Census Bureau (9 May 1995). . Retrieved on 25 February 2008.
*PH Reaney & RM Wilson, "A Dictionary of English Surnames:The Standard Guide to English Surnames", Oxford University Press, 1995, ISBN 0-19-863146-4.
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