Wright: A Surname History (Paperback)

Description

Wright: A Surname History — Volume 39 of The Surname Histories Series. The craftsman’s name — from Old English wyrhta, the joiner, the carpenter, often the mill builder whose hands raised the town’s working heart; the same occupational root that made the Wrights masters of wood long before it made them masters of the sky. WRIGHT stands No. 35 in the 2010 U.S. Census with 458,980 bearers — sitting directly behind King at #34 and completing the series’ fifteen-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), fifteen consecutive volumes at fifteen consecutive ranks. The signature story is the Wright brothers — Wilbur (1867–1912) and Orville (1871–1948), the Dayton bicycle-makers who flew the Flyer at Kitty Hawk on December 17, 1903, in the first powered, sustained, and controlled airplane flights — told in full, from the dunes to the lawsuits that followed the legend. The heraldry is framed honestly: with some thirty documented Wright branches there is no single universal Wright arms, so the plates show what the record actually holds — the Edinburgh Company of Wrights’ carpenter’s square and compasses, and the colonial arms of Sir James Wright, royal governor of Georgia, with its fleurs-de-lis and spearheads; and a gazetteer of Wright places separates Kitty Hawk’s dunes from the Georgia colony the Sir James line governed.