Description
Jackson is an English patronymic surname meaning “son of Jack.” Jack itself is the great medieval diminutive of John — the path runs John to Jackin to Jack. And because Jack was one of the commonest nicknames in medieval England, the name did not begin once. It began dozens of times, in dozens of places. Jackson is what the surname dictionaries call a polygenetic name: unrelated families, in different counties and different centuries, took up the same spelling independently. This book never pretends all Jacksons descend from one bloodline — it tells the English, Scottish, and Ulster-Scots lines as the separate stories they are, honestly.
The signature story is Andrew Jackson (1767–1845) — the Scotch-Irish boy of the Waxhaws, the general of New Orleans, the seventh president, “Old Hickory” — told with the honesty this series insists on: the slaveholding stated plainly, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 on the record, the North-Carolina-or-South-Carolina birthplace question left open where the evidence leaves it.
Inside: one attributed coat of arms — Jackson of Ahanesk, co. Cork, blazoned verbatim from Burke’s General Armory (1884) — a gallery of portraits and prose — Rachel Jackson, Helen Hunt Jackson, Robert H. Jackson at Nuremberg, Mahalia Jackson, Jesse Jackson, Reggie Jackson, Samuel L. Jackson, Bo Jackson, Peter Jackson, Janet Jackson, Glenda Jackson, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Michael Jackson, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, and more — the “King Andrew the First” caricature, the cabinet of curiosities from the twenty-dollar bill to the hickory walking stick, the places that carry the name — Jackson, Mississippi; Jacksonville, Florida; Jackson Hole, Wyoming — and the numbers we can stand behind: 19th in the 2010 U.S. Census (708,099 occurrences), outside the top fifteen in 2020.
The Surname Histories Series traces one family name per volume through etymology, migration, heraldry, famous bearers, and the towns that carry the name — a coffee-table keepsake for anyone who bears the name, past, present, and future, and for all those who love them.
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