Wogden

This is a very interesting and unusual English surname. Recorded as Wogden, Wogdon and Woogden, it is clearly locational, and therefore from some place, except that no such place in any of the known surname spellings is apparently recorded in the British Isles. Nor indeed is there any spelling anything like it, which suggests that it either originates from a now "lost" medieval village perhaps called "wo-denu" or similar meaning the "crooked valley", or less likely from a still existing place, but one where the surname spelling has been transposed to the point where the connection is no longer recognizeable. Locational surnames are by nature "from" names. That is surnames that were given to people as easy identification, after they left their original homes and moved elsewhere. As fewer than ten percent of the population of Britain could read or write even into Victorian times, and that local dialects were very thick, variant spellings of the original place name were quite normal. In addition if the place itself has disappeared, and that has been the fate of at least three thousand villages in the Brish Isles, then it is easy to see how unusual spellings developed. In this case early examples of the surname recording taken from surviving church registers of the diocese of Greater London include: Simon Wogden who married Elizabeth Wickens at St Dunstans in the East, Stepney, on July 25th 1629, and John Woogden, who was christened at the same church on July 26th 1635