AYTON FAMILY HISTORY
WILLIAM BYRON AYTON'S BOOK ON THE AYTON FAMILY
In 2005, William Byron Ayton of California published his long-awaited book on the early origins of the Ayton name, now available in CD-ROM format. An abstract of the book appears below, and anyone interested in obtaining a copy of the work should contact Ian Hall, providing a little background on their interest in the family and a suitable mailing address. Bill has decided to make the work available free of charge to interested researchers, but has requested that any recipients make a suitable donation to a humanitarian charity of their choice in recognition of his efforts. For the time being, Ian is also providing CD copies, packaging and postage free of charge on the same basis.
ABSTRACT
Owing to the existence of at least
four possible geographic origins, a plethora of phone-tically-similar surnames
and a confusing variety of Renaissance spellings, the genealogy of the Anglian
locative surnames Ayton
and Eighteen
in England and Ayto(u)n,
Aiton
and Eaton
in Scotland often is exasperatingly complicated. At the time that parish
churches in England and Scotland began recording vital statistics of their
parish-ioners in the mid-16th century, people surnamed Ayton
or any of several equivalents thereof were recorded near all four of the four
supposed eponyms of the surname: Ayton, Berwickshire; Eighton
(Banks), Durham; and Great/Little Ayton and West/East Ayton in the North Riding of Yorkshire. By the end of the
century, moreover, people of this sur-name were recorded in eight different
parishes in East Anglia (collectively Norfolk and Suffolk) and other South
England locales, where there were no other apparent eponyms for the surname
(with the possible exception of Heydon,
Norfolk).
If nothing else, this work
differentiates Ayton
from several other phonetically- or ety-mologically-similar modern surnames: Acton,
Aydon,
Ayrson,
Eaton,
Eden,
Eyton,
Haydon,
Hayton
and Heaton.
Inspired by Roger Bellinger’s findings, the author devised an innovative
orthographic technique and discovered a few examples of “run-on” spellings,
mis-transcribed names and other errors in the IGIs, thereby widen-ing the base
of records available to modern Ayton
researchers.
Drawing from genealogy, orthography
and linguistics, the author and George William Ayton demonstrated that,
depending on which English dialect was spoken, any of the following spellings
were variants of Ayton
in the earlier records of any given parish in Northeast England: Aiton,
Arton, Aton, Aydon,
Ayton, Eaton, Eden,
Edon, Etton, Eyton,
Ha(i)ton, Harton, Hayton,
Heaton and possibly some others. Moreover, these findings led to the
discovery of a new candidate for the earliest-recorded Ayton
in East Anglia.
Next, employing a classical test from
statistics in a novel way, the author confirmed what Ayton
researchers have long supposed: the preponderance of East Anglia Ayton
mi-grated there from Yorkshire (as indirectly shown by the works of McKinley and
Pound and discovered by John Bowden Ayton). Moreover, these analyses (1)
identified (with some unexpectedly-high levels of confidence) the specific
probable Northeastern locales of origin for five of the nine earliest-known
families of the name in East Anglia; and (2) revealed that Ayton
also migrated from two different linguistically-distinct locales near Eighton,
Durham (a finding that perhaps had not been suspected previously).
Lastly, combining methods from
cultural anthropology with information from genealogy, history, geography,
sociology and paleometeorology, a number of admittedly-educated guesses were
made to shed light on who the earliest Ayton
were and why and how they migrated to East Anglia, where they seem to have
become the progenitors of most of the modern Ayton,
et. al., not descended from the Nordic-Scots of ancient Berwickshire.
Some of the methods employed in this study might have applications to researchers of other surnames—locative ones in particular.
Anyone with queries or feedback regarding this work is invited to contact the coordinator for this page Ian Hall.
This page was last updated 16 May 2007