What's in a Name?

The internet has no shortage of theories on the origin of the Naramore name.  Some of them are even right.  The rest fall somewhere in between "close, but no cigar" and "seriously?".

Topping the list in the latter category is a very slick website that offers for purchase all sorts of surname-related merchandise.  You can get an extended family history, plus your family coat of arms, suitably framed or emblazoned on pretty much anything emblazon-able:  you name it, they surname it.

The Naramore coat of arms they show is indeed quite impressive, with a rampant golden lion against a bright red background.  But a hint that all might not be well in the company's research department comes from a look at their list of spelling variants, all of which seem to cluster around Narbonne.  Provided, of course, that you can somehow make the leap from Naramore to Narbonne, it's only a short skip and a hop to their conclusion that "this great aristocratic family" originally had its seat in Languedoc in the south of France.  Sacre bleu!

If by this point you haven't left their site in bewilderment, you might try salvaging the situation by noting that although Narbonne may not be a Naramore spelling variant, Narramore is.  And what a difference that additional "r" makes!  The website now solemnly informs us that Narramore is a habitational name from Cornwall, deriving from the Cornish words "nans" (valley) and "carow" (stag).   The family has somehow given up its ancestral seat in Languedoc and instead become lords of the manor of Nancaroow, all because of an additional "r".  At least the new coat of arms is still impressive, with three stags and a chevron.

But if Naramore is no more Nancarrow than Narbonne, we have at least crossed the English Channel and gotten closer to home.  In fact, there were Naramores living in Cornwall, as the entry in Bannister's 1871 Glossary of Cornish Names makes clear, although Bannister is incorrect in his speculation, however intuitively pleasing it might seem, that Naramore comes from narrow-moor.  It is also incorrect to assume that being a Cornish name implies a Cornish point of origin.  Naramore is only Cornish in the same sense that it is American; that is to say, Naramores came from elsewhere and settled in both places.

The "close, but no cigar" prize in the Naramore category of surname origin websites goes to surnamedb.com, which has the following to say:

This interesting name is of English locational origin from either Narramore in Devonshire, Northmore in Oxfordshire, recorded "la Mora" in the Pipe Rolls of 1195, and "Mora" in the Curia Rolls of 1208, or Northmore in Cornwall. The place name may be a topographical name for someone who lived on the northern part of a moor from the Medieval English "north", North and the Old English "mor", a moor.

Here, at last, we have the truth of the matter, although the website loses points for including the false trails of "(la) Mora" and Cornwall.  Naramore does in fact derive from "north of the moor" and is closely associated with the place-name of Narramore, which to this day is still a working farm in the village of Lustleigh.  Lustleigh is near the northern edge of Dartmoor in Devonshire, in southwest England.

As it turns out, the one who had it right all along was Percy Hyde Reaney, the late British historian whose 1965 Dictionary of English Surnames attributes Narramore to "dweller north of the moor" and who cites as an early instance of the surname a Reginald Bynorthemore who was in Lustleigh in 1318.  However, while Reaney's scholarship may have been impeccable, his exposition was a tad sparse.  So how do we really know that his is the right explanation of the family's origins?  

We'll look more at that in Part 2.

Captain Richard Narramore (c. 1650 - c. 1698)

 [Note:  significant updates have been made at the end of this article]

Although this blog was supposed to concern itself only with the descendants of Thomas Narramore (c. 1640 - c. 1690), there was another Narramore who swashed and buckled his way across the late 17th-century colonial stage and who now refuses to be ignored.  This is the infamous Captain Richard Narramore, who is commonly supposed to have been the brother of Thomas and the progenitor of the Southern branch of the Narramore family in the United States.  There's also that little matter of piracy on the high seas, which briefly landed him in trouble with the royal governor of Massachusetts in 1687.

In point of fact, I don't happen to believe any of these things about Richard.  He may indeed have been Thomas' brother, but the evidence is at best circumstantial:  they were both about the same age, appeared in Boston records at about the same time, and were engaged in maritime occupations.  The same could probably be said about a large portion of Boston's population at that time, which is another way of saying that their shared surname is the only significant connection between them; the records themselves give no hint of any interaction between them or their families.  On slightly firmer evidentiary ground, rather than being the ancestor of a large and vibrant group of American Narramores, it seems more likely that he was a genealogical dead end.  And as for being a pirate - well, it's a colorful story, but the best (or worst, depending on your point of view) that the records have to say about it is that he didn't exactly hang out with the Sunday-go-to-meeting set.  Probably not unique to a merchant ship-captain of that time and place.

A recent query about Richard on the World Narramore Family Facebook group prompted me to pull together all of the miscellaneous pieces of information I'd acquired on him over the years and to give some thought as to how they might fit together.  To be frank, the facts are few, and how they fit together is anyone's guess.  What follows are the facts I have and the guesses I've made from them.  If anyone has additional facts or different interpretations, please feel free to make use of the comments section.

Richard's first documented appearance in the colonies is in 1676, when Boston records show the birth of a son, John, to Richard and Ann Narramore on September 10th of that year.  As with Thomas and Hannah, no record of Richard and Ann's marriage exists, but also as with Thomas and Hannah, probate records supply key pieces of the missing information.  Specifically, the will of one William Waters, made in Boston in 1684, mentions real estate "which I have already made over to my three daughters for my life".   The daughters in question were Mary, wife of John Sellman; Urith, wife of John Nicks; and Ann, wife of Richard Narramore.  Keep the Nicks name in mind, as it will show up again later.

In November 1678, both Thomas and Richard appear on the list of those who took the Oath of Allegiance to King Charles II in Boston.  For what it's worth - possibly nothing - their names are greatly separated on the very long list.

Richard is in Boston tax records for both of the years 1687 and 1688.  It's hard to say without further research, but it doesn't appear that he lived in close proximity to Thomas (nor, again, is that necessarily significant).

Our first knowledge of Richard's occupation is gleaned from Suffolk county deeds, where he is mentioned in passing as being a ship captain.  Book 14 of the registry of deeds records that one John Bond, as surety for a debt owed to Nicholas Paige, pledged his half-interest in the ketch Sparrow to Paige.  The debt was to be repaid by the last day of May, 1687, or sooner, "if the ketch Sparrow, of which Richard Norrimore is master, returns before that time".

The return of the Sparrow to Boston in the summer of 1687 turned out to be a matter of great interest not just to Messrs. Bond and Paige, but to the royal authorities there as well.  The original records of what befell Captain Narramore and his passengers are to be found in the Massachusetts Archives (the so-called "Felt Collection", after the Rev. Joseph Felt who organized and assembled it), portions of which have appeared in various print sources, but the full story is best told in Dow and Edmond's "The Pirates of the New England Coast 1630 - 1730".  They do such a good job, in fact, that there is no need to attempt to retell it here, and the interested reader is instead simply referred to Google Books.   A reading of the events makes it clear that Richard was never himself suspected of piracy; instead, he was a ship-captain who in at least this one instance tried to make a little extra money on the side by providing discreet passage for a group of shady characters and their very probably ill-gotten gains. It is also interesting to note that two of the supposed pirates were said to have been dropped off at Damaris Cove, an island off the coast of what is now Maine, and the place from which Richard's in-laws hailed.

In any event, nothing of substance ever came of the matter and Richard was soon back at his normal trade.  Boston port records show the departure of the two-gun brigantine Resolution, captained by Richard Narramore with a crew of five, for South Carolina in October 1687.  But it may be that the piracy matter had left a bad taste for Richard in Boston, as the 1688 tax list is the last record we have of him there.

It is also at about this time, or just shortly afterward, that he begins showing up in the records of the then relatively new English settlement at Charleston, South Carolina.  Volume One of The Proprietary Records of South Carolina records a bill of sale from Edward Rawlings of Berkeley County, vintner, to Richard Norramore, mariner, for "a negro woman named Rose"; the sale price being thirty pounds and ten shillings sterling.  The date of the sale appears to have been in late 1690 or early 1691.

On June 15, 1693, Richard Norrimore and William Baker, mariners, sold the ketch Bristol, formerly called the Elizabeth, and "now lying before Charles Towne in Ashly River in Carolina, whereof . . . Richard Abram is now master" for the sum of 150 pounds.  It seems that Richard may have been moving up in the world, going from being a captain of vessels owned by others to a ship-owner himself.  Perhaps flush with this cash, Richard purchased (more of a long-term rental, actually) lots 143 and 144 at "Charles Towne" the following year.  In modern Charleston, these lots front on King Street, and comprise much of the area between Price's Alley and Ladson Street, including Weims Court.

One curiosity here is that although Richard is referred to as "of Carolina" and "of the county of Berkley in the said Province" in these records, his wife Ann seems never to have left Boston.  In any event, there is no record of her in the Carolinas, and in early 1692, right in the middle of the period that Richard was setting himself up in Charleston, we find Ann buying land on Hanover Street in Boston.  This is the last record we have of her until the settlement of her estate, in Boston, in 1700.

Another curiosity from this time period is the marriage of a Richard "Narrennore" and Ann Burden in Barbados in 1691.  Based on the long correspondence in the comments section below, I am pretty well persuaded that "Narrennore" is a mis-spelling of "Narramore", but am doubtful that this was the same Richard.  For all we know, he may well have had a woman in every port, but adultery seems far more likely than bigamy, especially given the close ties between Charleston, Barbados and Boston at that time.  Still, with the death of "Hannah Narrennore" (presumably the now-married Ann Burden) in Barbados early in 1692, there is no further mention of Barbados Richard, so the possibility that he and Charleston Richard were one and the same, though slim, still exists.

Following the ship sale and lot purchase, Richard makes two minor appearances in South Carolina court records, both in 1697.  In the first of these, he is described as "Commander of the Bridgateen Carrolina", while in the second, "cash monies received from Capt. Richard Norramore" are mentioned in an inventory of the estate of Robert Rhimer.  It is at this point that Richard exits from the written record.

Somewhere out on the internet (so of course it must be true) there is a supposed 1725 census of Charleston showing Richard Narramore as living there at that time.  Don't believe it.  Rather than being a 1725 census, it was instead taken from a list that was compiled in 1725 of the owners of the original lots in Charleston.  By 1725, only Richard's ghost would have been walking the streets of Charleston.  The evidence strongly suggests that he died not long after the last (1697) mention of him noted above.

This evidence is buried in amongst the probate records of Suffolk county, Massachusetts, where there is a sadly truncated file containing only a single document:  a petition of Urith Nix, sister of Ann Narramore, "late of Boston, widow", asking that administration of Ann's estate be granted to Ann's brother-in-law, John Dollen.  The petition is dated May 14, 1700.  The simplest explanation is that Richard died in 1698, give or take a few months, and that his widow Ann, who had probably remained in Boston with her sisters' family, herself died shortly afterwards.   That there is no mention of any children in the probate record is not conclusive, but it does tend to support the theory that the couple's only known son, John, was either himself dead or out of contact in England by that time.

It would thus seem that the first Narramore migration to South Carolina was of short duration, lasting only through the 1690s.  By the time of the Revolutionary War, there would be a new family of Narramores, headed by Edward Narramore, in the Kershaw District of the state, but that line's migration has now been definitively traced as being southward from North Carolina, where a William Narramore (probably Edward's father) can be found in records going back to the 1750s.

[Update:  10/31/2020]  So, it appears that Richard may not have been a genealogical dead-end after all.  A commenter who is the 7th-geat-grandson of a William Axson (1675 - 1733/4) of Charlestown SC notes that on June 17, 1730, William made a deed of gift to his son Thomas, chairmaker, of Towne lots 143 and 144, which his wife Mary had inherited from her brother, Richard Narramore.  These are the same lots that Captain Richard Narramore had originally purchased nearly 40 years earlier.  Based on this and information supplied by an earlier commenter, it now seems likely that Richard and Ann Narramore had at least three children:

• Richard.  Probably born c. 1670, married Ann Burden (or Hannah Borden) in Barbados in 1691.  She died there the following year.
• John.  Born in Boston in 1676.  Possibly died young; possibly the London shipwright "originally of Boston" who shows up in English Admiralty Court records in 1697/1698.
• Mary.  Probably born 1675 - 1680.  Married William Axson of Charlestown, SC, with whom she had at least one child, Thomas.  Died in Charlestown in the early 1730s.
  

This also seems to me to give more credibility to an alternate reading of the evidence:  namely, that the Richard Narramore who begins showing up in South Carolina and Barbados records in the early 1690s is actually the son of Richard and Ann (Waters) Narramore of Boston.  At the very least, it seems to provide a better explanation as to why the widow Ann Narramore remained in Boston.