Jones is a popular
family nameA family name is a type of surname and part of a person's name indicating the family to which the person belongs. The use of family names is widespread in cultures around the world...
of possibly
EnglishEngland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west and the North Sea to the east, with the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
origins. Its English usage comes from the term
son of JohnJohn is an English masculine given name.-Origins:The name John is derived, via Latin and Greek, from the Hebrew name Yochanan meaning "HaShem is gracious"....
in a similar manner to Johnson. In Wales, where the name is proportionately much more common, it derives from a corruption of Ioan, Sion or
Ieuan-Famous people named Ieuan:*Ieuan ab Owain Glyndŵr , reputed illegitimate son to Owain Glyndŵr, the last native Prince of Wales.*Ieuan ap Hywel Swrdwal , Welsh poet - first recorded Welshman to write an English poem....
. It is one of the most common surnames in the Welsh and English speaking worlds.
The Jones surname was first documented in 1279 in
HuntingdonshireHuntingdonshire is a local government district of Cambridgeshire, covering the area around Huntingdon. Historically it was a county in its own right...
,
EnglandEngland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west and the North Sea to the east, with the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
.
Jones is a popular
family nameA family name is a type of surname and part of a person's name indicating the family to which the person belongs. The use of family names is widespread in cultures around the world...
of possibly
EnglishEngland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west and the North Sea to the east, with the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
origins. Its English usage comes from the term
son of JohnJohn is an English masculine given name.-Origins:The name John is derived, via Latin and Greek, from the Hebrew name Yochanan meaning "HaShem is gracious"....
in a similar manner to Johnson. In Wales, where the name is proportionately much more common, it derives from a corruption of Ioan, Sion or
Ieuan-Famous people named Ieuan:*Ieuan ab Owain Glyndŵr , reputed illegitimate son to Owain Glyndŵr, the last native Prince of Wales.*Ieuan ap Hywel Swrdwal , Welsh poet - first recorded Welshman to write an English poem....
. It is one of the most common surnames in the Welsh and English speaking worlds.
History
The Jones surname was first documented in 1279 in
HuntingdonshireHuntingdonshire is a local government district of Cambridgeshire, covering the area around Huntingdon. Historically it was a county in its own right...
,
EnglandEngland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west and the North Sea to the east, with the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
. Its popularity in Wales stems from the use of
Ioan in the Welsh Authorised Version of the Bible.
Ioan is used here for
Ieuan, the Welsh form of
John.
In 1813-1841, there were about 85,000 people named Jones living in England (0.43% of the population) and about 145,000 people named Jones living in Wales (13.84% of the total population) By 1881, migration to the urban centres of England had equalised the numbers so that both countries had a little over 163,000 people named Jones recorded in the census of that year. Even so, it shows some areas of North Wales still had very high proportions of people carrying the name, for example in
Sir Feirionnydd (Merionethshire) 23.6% and
Sir Gaernarfon (Caernarfonshire) 22.3% were named Jones compared with 10.4% in Wales as a whole and 0.67% in England. Other, more readily identifiable Welsh names, such as Lloyd and Price (from
ap Rhys), had greater proportions of their numbers living in England than Wales in 1881 - this may be because of the higher concentrations of Jones in Welsh speaking areas.
It is likely that a number of Afro-Caribbean and African-American Joneses got their names from freed slaves adopting the names of the estate managers or owners.
Twentieth and twenty-first centuries
According to the
National Trust surname profiler Jones is the second most numerous surname in the UK. There were 391,909 Joneses on the UK electoral register in 1998. This represents a rate of 10,521 Joneses per million Britons or just over 1% of the population. The proportion of Joneses in other Anglophone countries is slightly lower: the 2002 rate in Australia was 6,548 per million; Canada, 3,882 per million; and 2002 New Zealand, 5,499 per million. This name is much rarer in the Republic of Ireland with a rate of only 144 per million in 2003. National Trust information for the United States places the 1990 rate at 8,334 per million (0.83%) based on telephone directory records; the 1990 United States census provides a frequency of 0.62%, providing an overall rank of 4
th most frequent (following
WilliamsWilliams is a patronymic form of the name William that originated in medieval England and later came to be extremely popular in Wales. The meaning is derived from son or descendant of Guillemin, the French form of William. Derived from an Old French given name with Germanic elements; will =...
and preceding
BrownBrown is a surname of English, Irish, and Scottish origin. It also originates independently in the United States, as an Anglicization of several other surnames. Brown is one of the most common family names in English-speaking countries...
).
See also