Nelson: A Surname History (Paperback)

Description

Nelson: A Surname History — Volume 47 of The Surname Histories Series. The name from the pet name: Nelson is the English patronymic “son of Nell,” from the Middle English personal name Nell or Nele — a pet form of Elias (less commonly of Niel, from Latin Nigellus — not Gaelic Niall) — plus the Americanized Swedish Nilsson and the Danish/Norwegian/North German Nielsen and Nilsen; the variant spellings (Neilson, Nielson, Nealson, Nilson, Nilsen, Nelsen); the earliest records of 1273 (Nel Fawkes; John fil. Nel, Cambridgeshire; Adam Nel, Oxfordshire); the historic concentration in the north (Cumberland/Westmorland, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Lincoln, Norfolk); and the Virginia line — Thomas “Scotch Tom” Nelson, from Penrith, Cumberland, c. 1700. NELSON stands No. 43 in the 2010 U.S. Census with 424,958 bearers — No. 40 in 2000 (412,236), a +3.1% rise (+12,722 bearers), three ranks slipped, stated honestly and never as a climb — composition (official 2010 Census surname table): 77.66% White, 15.97% Black, 0.67% Asian and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, 1.16% American Indian/Alaska Native, 2.00% two or more races, 2.55% Hispanic — sitting directly behind Adams at #42 and completing the series’ twenty-three-book running echo (Lee #21 → Pérez #22 → Thompson #23 → White #24 → Harris #25 → Sánchez #26 → Clark #27 → Ramírez #28 → Lewis #29 → Robinson #30 → Walker #31 → Young #32 → Allen #33 → King #34 → Wright #35 → Scott #36 → Torres #37 → Nguyen #38 → Hill #39 → Flores #40 → Green #41 → Adams #42 → Nelson #43). The signature chapter is “The Merchant Prince” — Thomas Nelson Jr. (1738–1789): merchant prince of Yorktown, signer of the Declaration of Independence, brigadier general at Yorktown, fourth governor of Virginia — the man who financed the war from his personal fortune and was ruined by it, told in full and framed honestly, including the “fire at my house” tradition (attributed, separated from documented fact) — with a verified portrait plate (the 1870 Henry Bryan Hall Sr. engraving, public domain). The heraldry is framed honestly too: no single ‘Nelson coat of arms’ exists — so the book plates nine as they stand: the Earls Nelson arms (featured — the shield the vendors sell as the Nelson crest; the textbook example of debased heraldry), Mandesley and Fairhurst (Lancaster 1664), Chaddleworth (Berks 1576), Sir George Nelson (Lord Mayor of London 1766), Bedale (York), the Secretary of the Navy Office (d. 1820), Munster 1632, Edinburgh 1872 — plus the honest empty shield, with the vendor-misattribution flags. The gallery honors Horatio Nelson (Lemuel Francis Abbott, 1799, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, public domain) in a verified portrait plate, with Knute Nelson, Samuel Nelson, Willie Nelson, and Judd Nelson in prose; and a gazetteer maps the name from the Nelson Counties of Virginia and Kentucky to Nelson, New Zealand.