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.
