English branches overview

English Branches - Overview

This page sets out what we have found about the early history of the Fairholm and Fairholme families in England. It also describes how the more recent branches may fit together.

Several Scottish families moved South to England and at least one English family moved North to Scotland. We use the terms English and Scottish to refer to the origins of branches rather than their current locations. We have not yet found any evidence for a common ancestry between the English and Scottish branches.

Earliest recorded uses of the surname in England

The earliest recorded use of the surname that we have found so far is Johannes and Magota ffayrhome who lived at Carleton, near Stayncrosse, in what is now South Yorkshire. They are entered in the Yorkshire Poll Tax Records for 1379. However, it cannot be assumed that they are very distant ancestors because Yorkshire surnames were particularly transitory and not necessarily hereditary. The idea of hereditary names took much longer to establish in the north of England than in the south.

The next use of the name is Nicolas Fairholme, son of Nicolas. He was christened on 28 February 1697 at Haydon Bridge, Northumberland. They lived at the hamlet of Lipwood. The same reservations about surnames apply and, of course, this could be a stray Scotsman.

First hereditary use of the surname & earlier surnames

The next recorded use of the name is by George and Anne Fairhome and their daughters Elizabeth, Anne and Sarah and another couple, William and Elizabeth Fairhome. They were all living in the parish of Lowdham from at least 1704. Both families were recorded as being paupers.

Lowdham is a small village on the edge of the Trent valley, about 11.5 kilometres in a straight line from the centre of Nottingham. In 1801 the population of the village was 553. Probably, it had not changed much over the previous hundred years. The parish also includes the villages of Gunthorpe and Caythorpe.

William and Elizabeth Fairholm represent the start of the first hereditary use of the surnames which I have found in England: their son John Fairhome who married Sarah, followed by John and Sarah's children: Sarah Fareholme and George Farehome. We suspect that John and Sarah Fairhome had four more children, but with the recorded surname of Fairin including a son, William. If they did then they could be the ancestors of all the English Fairholm and Fairholme branches. Further research may resolve this.

Prior to the William and Elizabeth, William and Alice Ferim were living at Lowdham and were the parents of Elizabeth, William and George who were born in 1666, 1668 and 1672 respectively. Ferim is a possible other spelling of the surname - see the item on pronunciation below. It is highly probable that the William and George mentioned in the previous paragraph are the sons of Willliam and Alice. There are no entries in the parish registers for Lowdham for the surname or its variations prior to the baptism of Elizabeth, although there is a burial of Bridget Ferim in 1666. The presumption has to be that William and Alice and, perhaps other family members, moved to Lowdham from elsewhere. In the nearby parishes of Bleasby and East Bridgford there are Ferima families in the early to mid-1600s, but there is no evidence to indicate a connection. Much further north in Nottinghamshire there are people with Ferim and other surname variations but again, no ovbious connection to the people at Lowdham. See under the Analysis section for further information on the distibutioun of early name variations.

Image by Pat Hayden on Unsplash

Shelford - late 1700s & early 1800s

William Fairholm from Shelford married Ann Miller from Upper Broughton, Nottinghamshire in 1769 at the parish church in Upper Broughton. The marriage register still exists with their entry in it. William is the ancestor of many of today's Fairholms and Fairholmes, including my family, and he is, possibly, the William Fairin born at Lowdham to John and Sarah Fairin. William and Ann lived at Shelford in the mid-1700s. Shelford is a very small village on the southern edge of the Trent. They had four sons, but only three survived to adulthood.

In the late 1700s / early 1800s eight distinct families had emerged in Nottinghamshire. For ease of identification we have named them after the places in which they lived.

Southwell 1

Southwell 2

Details on each of the branches can be found by using the English Branches drop-down list in the menu at the top of the page. For further information or to find out which branch you belong to please email me at queries@fairholmfamilytrees.info.

In the list above, the four branches in gold are all descended from William and Ann Fairholm.

Of their surviving sons:

John

Gervas

Joseph

May be the head of the Gedling 1 branch.

Moved to Gedling and married Ruth Sivians. They had five children. One son, Joseph, is the head of the Gedling 2 branch and another son, John, is the head of the Basford branch.

Moved to Nottingham and married Ann Smith at Nottingham St. Mary. They had five children including Benjamin, who is the head of the Radford branch, and John, who is the head of the Derby branch

Marriage of William Fairholm & Ann Miller

Below is a copy of the marriage entry for William Fairholm and Ann Miller for 03 June 1769 in the parish records of Upper Broughton, Ann Miller's home village.

William has made his mark with an 'X'. Ann's ability to sign her name is interesting. Literacy amongst woman was generally lower than amongst men, although it did vary widely. For example, in 1760, literacy for men in parts of Yorkshire was 64%, but for women 39%. William and Ann both grew up in small villages and so we could expect them to have had similar childhoods, but perhaps Ann had a different family background in which she was encouraged to learn. Maybe she 'married beneath herself'.

Reproduced with the permission of the Nottinghamshire Archives. Reference PR 15,367

Early family trees in Nottinghamshire

Click on an image opposite to open a pdf.

The file will open in a separate window in your web browser.

The first tree shows how all of the eight English branches MAY fit together in a simple format. It shows only the male lines - starting with William & Alice Ferim at Lowdham.

The second tree is a fuller version, showing more people and information.

Gervas' son, Joseph, remained in Gedling. His other son, John, had moved to Basford by 1840.

Joseph and Ann moved out of Nottingham to New Radford, just to the West of the city. Nottingham eventually expanded to absorb the smaller settlement.

Descendents of their son, Benjamin, lived or worked in New Radford for over one hundred years. Joseph's great grandson - also called Joseph - was operating his coal dealing business from Windmill Street in 1936.

Joseph and Ann's other son, John, moved to Derby - possibly the first of the family to move permanently out of Nottinghamshire.

Most family members stayed in Nottinghamshire until the First World War, with a few exceptions as shown on the map opposite. Sometimes they moved on again, and the family that moved to London returned to Nottingham a few years later. Since 1914 the migration across England - and emmigration too - has continued and is now too complicated to map easily. However, I have undertaken an analysis at county level. This is available in the Analysis section in the main menu.

Migration in Nottinghamshire & beyond

Simple tree

Detailed tree

Gedling 1

Burton Joyce

Gedling 2

Radford

Derby - my family

Basford

Photograph by Danny Muller from Unsplash

Pronunciation & spelling

In the item above I have linked Ferim and Fairin with Fairholm. The names Ferim, Fairin and Fairholm and other variations of Ferin, Farin are different when written down and if someone from the home counties of England pronounces them today then each one sounds very different. However, it is likely that the differences in pronunciation were not obvious in the past and the issue relates to differences are introduced by the modern pronunciation of words written in the 17th century, differences which depend on the accent used to some extent.

In considering the pronunciation and spellling of our ancestors' surnames, it is necessary to take into account the several translations that occurred between our ancestors speaking their names in the 1600s and us speaking them today:

I have no expertise in the accents of 17th century Nottinghamshire but, even today, my surname is not pronounced by everyone in the same way that I do. For most of my childhood I lived in South Yorkshire. There my surname was pronounced fer-roawwm. Anyone only hearing the surname spoken might well think that it was spelt Ferrome. It was usually necessary to spell out the name for anyone who had to write it down. My father used to tell people that it was like Stockholm, although that did not help often.

Nottinghamshire is south east of where I lived, with somewhat different accents. From some on-line research (including at mikegravel.org), it seems likely that the surname is currently pronounced something like fehr-hrum there - not very far from Ferim or Fairin, even over four hundred years later.

All of which leads me to conclude that Ferim, Fairin, etc and Fairholm were all the same name in Nottinghamshire in the 1600s, regardless of the different spellings then and the pronunciations of those spellings now.

I have included an audio clip opposite, with various pronunciations of Ferim, Fairin and Fairholm to show that the differences can be obvious and also can be a lot less obvious when spoken.

As I worked on this item, I wondered what the surname may have sounded like if it was spoken in the original old norse. Academics tend to use modern Icelandic as an approximation of the old language. The forvo.com website translated fair and holm into spoken Icelandic for me. Putting the two parts together, the name sounds like farweir-holum. As it turms out, not very helpful, given that it creates a very notieceable difference compared to now, albeit one separated by over one thousand years. Reconciling the difference over that timescale is a bit beyond my abilities as an amateur family historian. It seems best to leave the issue at that point because there is no possibility of tracing the family that far back.

Click on the small triangle above left to play the audio file

Probable early surname variations at Lowdham

Fairin

Ferim

Farin

Ferin

Photograph by mikhail pavstyuk on Unsplash

The images are by Johnoaz on pixabay.com, aurora KO on unsplash & alessio fiorentino on unsplash respectively

Produced by Roger Fairholm