March

This name derives from the Medieval English or Olde English 'marche' meaning a boundary and was originally given as a topographic name to a dweller by a boundary, especially the border between two territories for example the Marches between England and Wales. In some cases the name may be locational from March in Cambridgeshire. Recorded as 'Maerche' in the Domesday Book of 1086, the name, derives from the locative case of the Olde English pre 7th Century 'mearc', a boundary. The surname from this source is first recorded in the latter half of the 13th Century, (see below). Henry le March who appears in the 'Hundred Rolls of Oxfordshire', dated 1273 may have been baptised in the month of March or may have owed a feudal obligation then. One, John March in Sware was recorded in the Commissary Record of Lanarkshire, Scotland in 1624. The first recorded spelling of the family name is shown to be that of Henry de la Marche, which was dated 1295 - 'Records of Barnwell', Cambridgeshire, during the reign of King Edward I, The Hammer of the Scots, 1272 - 1307. Surnames became necessary when governments introduced personal taxation. In England this was known as Poll Tax. Throughout the centuries, surnames in every country have continued to "develop" often leading to astonishing variants of the original spelling.