Donisthorpe One-Name Study

Donisthorpe
One-Name Study

Topics

About the Donisthorpe One-Name Study
Variants
Origin of the surname
Historical occurrences
Distribution of the name
DNA project
Contact Details

About the Donisthorpe One-Name Study

Interest in the Donisthorpe family began when I was small, it being fueled with regular installments of the family history. As I grew older I began taking notes on the Donisthorpes whenever I ran across a new name or interesting fact about the family, until the collection filled notebooks. I started a formal study of the name in 1975 and have been corresponding with other Donisthorpe researchers from around the world. I enrolled the name in the Guild of One Name Studies in 2005.

Variants

The first known variant of Donisthorpe is its spelling of 'Durandestorp' that appears in the 1086 Domesday Book. Other variants are Donisthorp, Donnisthorp(e), Donnesthorp(e), and Dunisthorpe.

Origin of the surname

Donisthorpe is the name of a village in the NW corner of Leicestershire, England. Customarily, Donisthorpe could be used as the surname for anyone who came from that village, or it could be the surname of the person for whom the village was named and is still in use by his descendants.

Giving some credence to the latter argument, a letter from 1882 was recently unearthed, written to George Edmund Donisthorpe from a friend in Denmark. The letter was written about an estate called 'Dintestorp,' that presumably was the original form of Donisthorpe. One can only wonder if sometime in the early 900s a restless young man from the Dintestorp estate in Sweden joined a group of Vikings in a raid on the north of England, then decided to settle in to a corner of Leicestershire and give his new home the name of his former one. And perhaps it was even his own name!

Further adding to that argument, in a 1912 letter by Wordsworth Donisthorpe to his Aunt Jessie, he wrote, 'We did not 'come over with the Conqueror,' you will be sorry to hear, we were already here in the far North West of Leicestershire.'

Historical occurrences

William the Conqueror, the former Duke of Normandy, France, commissioned a statistical survey of his new kingdom that was so complete it was known as the Domesday (or Doomsday) Book, for surely there could be no closer reckoning on Judgement Day. It was in this survey, finished in 1086, that Durandestorp first appeared as the name of a small village in the NW corner of Leicestershire. No other mention of the name is found until it begins to appear in land records nearly one hundred years later where it was used as a surname. Whether Durandestorp was the family name of the descendants of the family who gave their name to the village, or whether it was given to all the people who came from that village, its exact origin is still being studied.

Distribution of the name

In the 1881 UK census there were 22 Donisthorpes listed in Leicestershire, five in Hampshire, five in Middlesex, three in Lancashire, one in Worcestershire, and one in Hertfordshire. In the 1880 US census there were six Donisthorpes listed in Nebraska.

Donisthorpes have been traced from Leicestershire to southern England, to France (the lace makers), to the US, and in three separate migrations, to Australia.

DNA project

A Donisthorpe DNA Project with Family Tree DNA has recently been started in the hope of answering the following questions: Is everyone that bears the name of Donisthorpe a descendant of a common ancestor? Can the origin of the name be traced back as far as the village of Dintestorp in Sweden?

Contact details

For further information, contact:

Mrs Jean Getchell
E-mail:

This page last updated 25 February 2008.