Green: A Surname History

Description

Green: A Surname History — Volume 45 of The Surname Histories Series. The name from the Old English grēne (“green”) — the nickname (green dress, the young, the Green Man) → GREEN; the Middle English grene (“the village green”) — the topographic → GREEN; with side streams from Grene, the Irish Ó hUainín and Ó Fathaidh, the German Grün, the Danish, and Groen. GREEN stands No. 41 in the 2010 U.S. Census with 430,182 bearers — No. 37 in 2000 (413,477), a +4.0% rise (+16,705 bearers), four ranks slipped, stated honestly and never as a climb — sitting directly behind Flores at #40 and completing the series’ twenty-one-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), twenty-one consecutive volumes at twenty-one consecutive ranks. The signature story is Hetty Green (1834–1916) — the “Witch of Wall Street,” the richest woman in America — told in full and framed honestly, with her c. 1900 portrait with her Skye terrier (Hulton Archive / Getty Images, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons) as the volume’s only portrait plate. The heraldry is framed honestly too: no single ‘Green coat of arms’ exists — Burke’s General Armory (1884) lists some sixty-five distinct Green, Greene, and Grene entries, one per house — so the book plates seven of them as they stand: the Milnrow baronets’ arms (featured), Marass, Sampford, Poulton Hall, Slyne, Kilmanahan, and Greene’s Norton — plus the honest empty shield. Discover the story behind your name!