Origin of the Hoare Surname and the name’s meaning - Introduction

Victorian Surname Dictionaries

The Patronymica Britannica [1] provides the following information:

"HOAR. HOARE. Doubtless from A-Sax. hár, hoary, grey; applied to a person having a grey or hoary head. The Common medieval form is Le Hore."

An Etymological Dictionary of Family and Christian Names [2] provides further details:

"Hoare. White, hoar, grey."
"Hore. Hoar, white, grey. Horr, Local a ravine.

More detailed information can be found in the Dictionary of English and Welsh Surnames [3]:

"Hoar, Hoare, Hore. - Nick. 'the hoar,' i.e. the white, the greyish white; probably from complexion of the hair; cf, Fairfax, Grey, White, Black.
'Ae olde men and hore
That help-lees ben of strengthe.'
Piers plowman , 1682-3
Very common in the Hundred Rolls [4], as for instance:
Adam le Hore, co. Derby, 1273. A.
John le Horre, co. Norf., ibid.
Alicia la Hore, co. Oxf., ibid.
Richard le Hore, co. Soms., 1 Edw. III: Kirby's Quest, p. 84. London, 3, 55, 6; New York, 5, 8, 4."

Old Pedigrees

Many old publications  can now be found online at a variety of websites. For example a fully digitised copy of "Some Account of the Early History and Genealogy of the Families of Hore and Hoare" is available at the Internet Archive. This was particularly interesting for me as the document identified that in the Domesday Book a village (modern day Ower) was known as "Hore". I am currently a long way from tracing my Hampshire Hoare family back to the village of Hore in 1086 however it is certainly motivating.

Entry for Hore in the Domesday Book
(image kindly made available by Professor J.J.N. Palmer. Image may be reused under a Creative Commons BY-SA licence - please credit Professor J.J.N. Palmer and George Slater.)

If you have Hoares (or any of its variants - Hoar, Hore, Horre, Horr, Hoor or Hor) in your family history in Hampshire or Sussex then I would be delighted to hear from you.

[1] Mark Anthony Lower MA FSA (1860) Patronymica Britannica A Dictionary of Family Names of the United Kingdom, John Russell Smith, London. Page 159.
[2] William Arthur MA (1857) Etymological Dictionary of Family and Christian Names. With an Essay, on their Derivation and Import. Sheldon Blakeman & Co. New York. Pages 160 & 163.
[3] Charles Wareing Bardsley MA (1901) Dictionary of English and Welsh Surnames with Special American Instances. Henry Frowde. London. Page 387.
[4] The Hundred Rolls are a census of England and parts of what is now Wales taken in the late thirteenth century. They are named for the hundreds by which most returns were recorded.

The Chicago Connection Pt. 1

My direct line of descent comes from Hoare families who originated on the borders of Hampshire and Sussex. Over the years I have been undertaking family reconstitution on each generation to try to fill in as many gaps as I can for my direct line. As a result when investigating the family of Samuel Hoare my 2x great-grandfather I was astonished to find that after his first five children were born in London between 1862 and 1870, his sixth child Florence Ann Hoare was shown in the censuses as having been born in Chicago W, USA in approximately 1874. Five further children were again born in London from 1876 until 1880.So did Samuel's wife Emma Winfield just pop over to Chicago between 1870 and 1876 to have a daughter and then come back or was this a failed attempt at immigration? If it was immigration for the whole Hoare family what could have encouraged them to leave their well established roots in London and move to Chicago?

The Great Chicago Fire burned from Sunday 8th October to Tuesday 10th October 1871. The fire killed hundreds and destroyed over three square miles of the city of Chicago. Although the fire was one of the largest disasters of the 19th century, the rebuilding that began helped develop Chicago as one of the most economically important American cities.

That rebuilding was undertaken by both American and migrant workers who came to Chicago for the work. Samuel Hoare was a bricklayer one of the many trades for whom work was advertised as being available in Chicago. However that advertising, often by shipping lines and passenger agencies, hawked the high wages and steady work that were supposedly the lot of all who came to the city. In Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871-1874 (Historical Studies of Urban America), Karen Sawislak describes the tumultuous months of rebuilding that followed the fire and the difficulties that there were for foreign workers, "One grim letter from a British migrant to Chicago appeared in the Manchester Courier in late March [1872]. Noting that 'money is scarce here,' the writer reported that 100 bricklayers had left the city, 'finding it impossible to support themselves and families, board and everything else being so high". At the same time in March 1872 the Workman's Advocate was reporting that 400 bricklayers, direct from England, had landed in the city. The paper reported that by April 1872 that 25 to 30 skilled tradesmen were arriving in Chicago every day.

If you want to look into your own Chicago family history there are some excellent books on the topic. The techniques of family reconstitution are also admirably explained in Nuts and Bolts: Family History Problem Solving Through Family Reconstitution Techniques

Have you had some odd migrations abroad with a quick return to the United kingdom? If so we would be delighted to hear about them in the comments below.

Laws of Migration

So how did it come about that the Hoare name spread across southern England?

This expert suggested some of the answers during the nineteenth century.

E.G. (Ernest George) Ravenstein

E.G. (Ernest George) Ravenstein was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany to a family of cartographers. When he was 18 years old he became a pupil of Dr. August Heinrich Petermann. After moving to England, Ravenstein became a naturalized British Subject and was in the service of the Topographical Department of the British War Office for 20 years (1855–75). A long-serving member of the councils of the Royal Statistical and Royal Geographical Societies, he was also Professor of Geography at Bedford College in 1882–83. He was the first to receive the Victoria gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society (1902) for geographical research.

A geographer by trade, most of Ravenstein’s published works on migration came after his retirement in 1874. While in the employ of the War Office he produced numerous publications and maps primarily dealing with Africa. His statistics and projections were much respected and used as a basis for official planning at the time; he had even predicted that human population would grow beyond the earth's capacity by the mid-20th century (subsequent developments in agriculture and fertilizers have altered the basis of that projection).He established a theory of human migration in the 1880s that still forms the basis for modern migration theory. It considered the implications of distance and different types of migrant, with women more likely than men to migrate within the country of their birth but less likely than men to leave the country of their birth. His migration research, especially his two papers on the “laws of migration” were very influential on later work dealing with the structure and process of migration. Although his work focused on current migrations Ravenstein had a major impact on migration studies across many disciplines.

Ravenstein's laws immediately created a stir, with some complaining that he had identified patterns of migration, but that this was not the same as discovering "natural laws." Four years, later, he presented another paper that looked at migration patterns elsewhere in Europe and North America, in which he highlighted an exception to migration patterns based upon the American frontier experience. He noted that people are more willing to travel long distances to occupy unsettled land than they would in a country more fully settled, as was the case in the United Kingdom.

Later social scientists would be more kind to Ravenstein's legacy. Some recent reviews of his work credit him with as many as eleven original migration laws. He is generally credited with the origination of distance decay theories of migration and spatial interaction, and later theories expanded on "push" and "pull" factors of migration. Later studies by R. Lawton in the 1950s and 1960s reused Ravenstein's methods but added additional demographic indicators to arrive at refined migration models.

Selected Relevant Works:

Ravenstein, E. G. 1876. The Birthplace of the People and the Laws of Migration.

Ravenstein, E. G. 1885. The Laws of Migration. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 48: pp. 167-235.

Ravenstein, E. G. 1889. The Laws of Migration. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 52: pp. 241-305.

Ravenstein's Laws of Migration [1]

1. The majority of migrants go only a short distance.
2. Migration proceeds step by step. There is a process of absorption, whereby people immediately surrounding a rapidly growing town move into it and the gaps they leave are filled by migrants from more distant areas, and so on until the attractive force is spent.
3. Migrants going long distances generally go by preference to one of the great centres of commerce or industry.
4. Each current of migration produces a compensating counter-current.
5. Natives of towns are less migratory than those of rural areas.
6. Females are more migratory than males within the kingdom of their birth, but males more frequently venture beyond.
7. Most migrants are adults: families rarely migrate out of their country of birth.
8. Large towns grow more by migration than by natural increase.
9. Migration increases in volume as industries and commerce develop and transport improves.
10. The major direction of migration is from the agricultural areas to the centres of industry and commerce.
11. The major causes of migration are economic.

[1] Grigg, D B 1977. “E G Ravenstein and the ‘Laws of Migration’” Journal of Historical Geography, 3, pp. 41-51

Do Ravenstein's Laws provide reasons for the movements of your ancestors? If you think so why don't you tell us about it below?