Barbrook

Seemingly recorded in various spelling forms which include Barbrook, Barbrick and Barberick, this is an English surname. It is clearly locational, and apparently from the village of Barbrook meaning the bar or causeway over the water meadows, in the county of Devonshire. However there is not the slightest evidence that that is the case. Locational surnames are and were, by their very nature, "from" names. That is to say names given to people after they left their original village to move elsewhere. Elsewhere was often the next town or village, but equally it could mean a move to London, a place which legend said was "paved with gold", and therefore an atomatic draw. It was also the only place that most people would have heard of, outside their immediate locality. Spelling being over the centuries at best rudimentary and local dialects very thick, in turn lead to "sounds like" spellings. However it was usual for a locational surname to appear somewhere in the registers of the locality from which it hailed, but in this case there are none to be found from either Devon or Somerset or even as far away as Cornwall, in any of the known spellings. Also even in the diocese of Greater London, the surname does not seem to be recorded before the 18th century, generally regarded as much too late for the creation of a surname, so we have a mystery. Early examples of the surnames recording include Ann Barbrick, the daughter of Robert Barbrick, christened at St Mary Whitechapel, Stepney, on January 1st 1785, and Lidia Barbrook, the daughter of James Barbrook, christened at St Dunstans in the East, also Stepney, on July 7th 1799.