My paternal grandmother’s maiden name was Winkle. Don’t laugh – this is a relatively common name in the Potteries, and presumably originates in the place name Wincle, which is a village in Cheshire. The Oxford Names Companion gives two possible etymologies of the place name: “Hill of a man called *Wineca”, or “Hill by a bend”. OE personal name + hyll, or wince + hyll.

When I started researching this part of my family history, I spent a cold afternoon in a church vestry copying out all the relevant birth marriage and death entries in the Registers, and noted that some of the entries had the spelling “Wintle”. I was interested, but not surprised, because a feature of the Potteries dialect is the merging of the consonant clusters /tl/ and /kl/ as /tl/. (It is common, for instance, to hear people talking about “pittled onions”.) I assumed, therefore, that the vicar, not being a native of the Potteries, was hearing “Wintle” and spelling the name accordingly, despite the regular local spelling being “Winkle”. I continued to collect references to the Winkle families of the district for some years, including all the entries in the censuses from 1841 to 1881. I noticed, however, that ‘my’ family appeared not to be listed before 1881, even though my great grandfather was already 45 at that time. The light began to dawn with the discovery in the 1881 census that my great grandfather was born in the Forest of Dean. Down in Gloucestershire, the name that is common is Wintle, and I now found that he had moved to the Potteries some time after 1851, when he was 15. He married, as Wintle, in 1859. He and his growing family are all listed in the censuses of 1861 and 1871 as Wintle.

My assumption about the dialectal confusion had been correct, but the wrong way round: by the time of my grandmother’s birth in 1877, the registrar had heard my great grandfather say “Wintle”, but had assumed that this was his dialectal way of saying “Winkle”, and registered my grandmother under that spelling. The whole family became “Winkle” by 1881, and when my great grandparents died, within two weeks of each other in 1924 – after 65 years of marriage, made even more remarkable by the fact that my great grandfather had been a coalminer – they were both buried as “Winkle”.

So even in an age when literacy was spreading very fast, the spelling of family names could still be affected by local dialectal considerations.

In the late 1980s and 1990s, Oxford University Press published three books of names: The Oxford Dictionary of Surnames (Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges, 1988); A Dictionary of First Names (Hanks and Hodges, 1990); and A Dictionary of English Place-Names (A.D.Mills, 1998). Then in 2002, OUP decided to reissue all three volumes under a single cover as The Oxford Names Companion. I am naturally disappointed that they did not include a fourth title: The BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names (G.E.Pointon, 1983), as this would have nicely complemented all three.

Unfortunately, they did not take this opportunity of updating the volumes to make them consistent.

I don’t think I’m unusual in this: when I got my copy of the Companion, I looked up my own name. It’s there, in both the Surnames and the Place-Names sections, but the entries do not correspond.

Surname:

Pointon English: habitation name from a place in Lincs., so called from OE Pohhingtūn ’settlement (OE tūn) associated with Pohha‘, a byname apparently meaning ‘Bag’ (cf. POKE). Var.: Poynton

Place-Name:

Pointon Lincs. Pochinton 1086 (DB). ‘Estate associated with a man called Pohha’. OE pers. name + -ing- + -tūn.

Poynton Ches. Povinton 1249. ‘Estate associated with a man called *Pofa’.  OE pers. name + -ing- + -tūn.

Poynton Green Shrops. Peventone 1086 (DB). ‘Estate associated with a man called *Pēofa’. OE pers. name + -ing- + -tūn.

(DB = Domesday Book; * before a name means it is not attested)

So we have three places from which the Pointons/Poyntons may take their name, not one. How can we decide which is the most likely in any particular case? University College London and the National Trust have come to our aid.

There is now a website, http://www.nationaltrustnames.org.uk/, which tracks the distribution of family names in Great Britain in 1881 and 1998.

This gives the absolute frequency of a name, and also its relative frequency (occurrences per million of the population) and ranking (where its frequency stands in relation to all other family names). There is also a map which shows the areas where the name appears most frequently. In both 1881 and 1998 there were heavy concentrations for both spellings in Staffordshire and Cheshire. Allowing for some of the south Staffordshire families having moved there from Shropshire, it seems clear that the Companion has got it wrong in stating categorically that Pointon originates in Lincolnshire – the least likely origin of the three possible ones for the vast majority of Pointons, who live in north Staffordshire and south Cheshire. Hanks and Hodges seem to have been beguiled by the spelling, which is clearly arbitrary, and to have ignored the evidence in their own research for the alternative (Poynton).