Issue 9 October 2008
Welcome
Welcome to a belated second 2008 issue of the Hagger One Name Study Newsletter. We have been so involved in many other things during the summer we have only just got round to turning our attention to producing a Newsletter to tell you something of what has been going on with regards to the One Name Study.
You could help the study by either collecting data and sending it to us in a form
that it can be directly loaded into our database or by transcribing data for us.
If you would like to help please contact Peter Hagger -
One Name Study Data
When we produced the last Newsletter some 10 months ago we had over 30,000 individual records in our master database with probably upwards of 5,000 records still to load. Now we have 33,000 records loaded without any reduction in the quantity of the data still to be loaded. We also have over 120 families in some stage of reconstruction.
Significant increases in our data have been in the area of probate records, particularly
a more or less complete extract of the probate records index for Hagger an its variants
from 1858 to 1990 (1,124 entries). We also have a large number of Hagger wills from
before 1858, which require transcribing -
Hagger Origins
Recently we got Nameswell to give us their opinion of the origin of the Hagger name and their research confirmed many of our own findings (see Origins page). Nameswell refer to the 1881 census distribution and various surname text books.
The Dictionary of Surnames by Hanks and Hodges includes Hagg*r as a variant of Haggard,
which is said to be a nickname from Middle England (1100 -
Reaney and Wilson, in a Dictionary of English Surnames, lists Hagg*r under Hager as a derivative of Middle English ‘haggen’ to cut or chop, indicating a woodcutter.
Nameswell point out that in the 1881 census Hacker had a very different distribution to Hagger. They draw no conclusion from this.
They also pointed out that Hagger was to be found in the IGI in Methley, a village in Yorkshire as early as 1564. By 1881 there were just 29 Haggar’s in Yorkshire, but none in Methley.