Fairpo

Apparently recorded as Fairpool, Fairpan, Fairpun and Fairpo, this is an English locational surname of great rarity. It would appear to be a dialectal short form of the 'lost' village name Fairpool, which is occasionally found in church register recordings as shown below, although as to where 'Fairpool was is a total mystery. It is similar to Westlake and Eastlake, both former villages by the side of lakes, and which have provided surnames, but which as places have now totally disappeared, Fairpool was probably 'lost' when most of the fenland of East Anglia as far north as the River Humber in Yorkshire was drained between the 14th and 18th centuries. In that period some three thousand hamlets and villages are known to have disappeared, leaving as their only trace the surviving surname, often in a myriad of spellings, some very remote from the original form. This is all conjecture, as it is in most cases when dealing with surnames whose spelling has clearly been changed over the centuries. In this case early examples of the recordings may be that of Sarah Fairpan at the church of St Mary le Bone, in the city of London in 1684, and the later one of Edward Fairpool and his wife the former Anne Newton, at Ebenezer Presbyteriun church, Swalwell, County Durham, on June 4th 1808.