Starsmeare

Recorded as Staresmore and Starsmeare, this is an English surname It is locational from a now "lost" place thought to have been in the county of Northamptonshire, owing to the popularity of the surname in the county. The derivation is from the Old English pre 7th Century word "steorra" and "mor", a marsh or fen. The first element was a byname for someone with a streak of white hair, giving the placename meaning of "Starr's moor". An estimated five thousand villages and hamlets are known to have disappeared in Britain since circa 1100, owing to natural disasters as the Black Death of 1348, in which an height of the population perished, or to the widespread practice of "clearing" whereby large areas of common land were seized by landowners to make profitable sheep pastures in the 14th and 15th Centuries. Amongst the recordings in the surviving early church registers of the city of London is the christening of Richard Thomas Starsmeare on November 14th 1828 at St. Luke's Chelsea. The first recorded spelling of the family name is may be that of Lucy Staresmore, christened at Frolesworth, Leicestershire, in 1545, during the reign of King Henry V111th, known as "Good King Hal", 1509 - 1547. Surnames became necessary when governments introduced personal taxation. In England this was sometimes known as the Poll Tax. Throughout the centuries, surnames in every country have continued to "develop" often leading to astonishing variants of the original spelling.