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Turnage History in England
Our Turnage family had its origins in southeastern England in the County of Essex. Until the 1300's and 1400's, the people of England and the rest of Europe did not have "family" names. Our modern family names came about as a direct result of the necessity to identify everyone better for the king's tax lists.
Contrary to information published in 1935 by one of our cousins, our Turnage family is not "Scotch-Irish" (Scot-Irish) nor Irish nor did our ancestors ever live in either Scotland or Ireland. If you have come across this info in your search for your Turnage - Turnidge ancestors--strike it from your records: it is false. On the contrary, our Turnage family is as English as you can get.
I did a lot of research on our ancestors before preparing the first books ever written on our Turnage ancestors in England. The first book has three companion books that include marriages, baptisms, births, burials and old wills, dating back to the early 1500's. The family had their origins in Essex County, a shire (county) in southeast England, part of which is now within the metropolitan government of Greater London but when our ancestors left there and came to North Carolina, this was a rural county of small towns and very small farms. It remained so until after World War II, when London's booming population spilled over into the southwestern part of the county.
The published info that our family name means "a turner of lathes" is also a gross mistake, made apparently by English "authorities" who did not bother to do any actual research on the family names of most commoners. Our family name actually has its origins in the "Old Religion", Asatru, of the Saxon folk and their other Germanic kinsmen of northern Europe. One of their three primary gods was Thunor (called Thor in the Scandanavian countries), the god of weather, protector of the crops and maker of thunder. His name can be found in site-names throughout England, along with place-names for the other Saxon primary gods Woden (Oden) and Frey.
"Thunor's ness" was once such a site: ness is an ancient word still used in England which means a high place or a peninsula. Ancient folk in practically every land always used high places for worship. Thunor's ness eventually evolved into TURNESS and TURNISH. We can still find these two spellings in family names in both England and the US today. In the English language, "age" has developed from both "ness" and "wich", which means a small community (smaller that a town). The suffix of "age" has nothing to do with the word age which applies solely to dating by time. The English language (as all languages have) has continuously changed over the centuries and continues to do so today. So has its spelling: in fact, nothing was standardized in English spelling until about the 1800's, by which time our language in America had become a distinctly separate dialect.
The oldest will still preserved today on our family, dated 1541, used the spelling Turnehatche and Tornehatche. Later spellings included Turnitge, Turnedge, Turnehoneg and many others. The spelling "Turnage" did not come into use until the late 1500's.
Years ago, I started a little game in which I asked people who did not know any of our relatives how to spell the name "Turnage": I got a lot of different spellings. Granddaddy Turnage had a soft Southern speech and his pronunciation would be spelled "Tunnage", since we in the South don't usually pronounce the "R" in many words and softly in others. Lo and behold--I found a book on English which states the people of southeastern England do not pronounce the "R" within words (as opposed to the beginning or end). Sure enough, I did find the spelling Tunnage that developed in one village.
Folks today are mostly unaware of the fact that very few commoners before 1800 could read and write. All of the wills and other church documents were written by either priests or vicars of the Roman Catholic church and after England broke from that church, of the Church of England (Anglican). The spelling of our family name depended solely upon who wrote the record and their own educational level. Our ancestors had absolutely nothing to do with deciding how their name should be spelled.
George Turnage Junior was born in 1671 in Essex County. He is the Founding Father of our family in America. A copy of his baptism record is printed in the book Turnage Family History, Volume I, published by the Turnage Family Association. He was the son of George Turnage Senior and his wife Mary Ann. You can read more about George Senior and our Turnage relatives in England in the above book. To date, I have not found any other records on George Junior until a record dated 1711 in the English Colony of North Carolina. I can find no record to tell us when he immigrated to America, since so few ship's lists of passengers have been preserved for that period.
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BACK to Turnage Family Association HOME page18 June, 1998