Daglish - the development of a name

There has been little new Daglish news to write about recently. If you have any stories, photos or anything that might be of interest, please let me know.

Today I attended a meeting of the London branch of the Northumberland & Durham Family History Society. The speaker was Rosalind Moffitt and the subject "Surnames in the North East".

Rosalind studies the history of surnames, in particular those from North East England where her family comes from. After studying English at Durham University, Rosalind trained as a Speech and Language Therapist and spent time working with children. She began her talk by looking at how young children adapt words - and how this might be applied to ways in which surnames developed in an age of widespread illiteracy.

Names might be simplified by dropping syllables from the word or maybe just the last consonant or by using different vowels.

Looking at the entries in the Whickham parish register for marriages - in which Daglishes have appeared since the late 1500s - we can perhaps see some examples of this.

The earliest entry is for the name Daglis, maybe a case where the last consonant has been dropped. Will Daglis married Magdalene Thompson on 30 January 1596.

Under burials, there is an entry for 3 April 1613 which reads:

"A POORE child of Daglis, his wife, and the mother and two other children of Daglis. Buried."

The spelling of Daglis continued to be used until around 1615, after which various others are used - including Dagglish, Dagleish and Dagleese - until the name is shown as Daglesh, a change of vowel. This begins with the marriage of John Daglesh to Barbery Croser on 31 May 1669 and continues until around 1691.

After this date the spelling Daglish is consistently used.

This is how the name may have developed in one key Parish - this may also have been influenced by changes in the local vicar and how the name was written down. In other places the name may have developed differently.

The subject of how the name may have changed is of interest because of some recent developments with the Daglish DNA Study.

We now have matching DNA results with a person named DOUGLAS and with a person named DALGLIESH. Both of these people live in Scotland. Both of these names have been suggested in various reference books as the source of the name Daglish (though neither have been found to be linked through standard research of historical records).

It is perhaps possible to see how Douglas may link to the early records as Daglis, and also to imagine that the Scottish name Dalglish or Dalgliesh may have been simplified if it moved across the border into North East England. This is a subject for further research.

Rosalind Moffitt runs a service Nameswell Surname Research and also writes for Family Tree Magazine.