Kays Everywhere
A local historian who has extensively researched Lancashire family history once said ‘whatever you do, don’t touch the Kays’. Anyone who has tried to research their family history in the south of Lancashire or the West Riding of Yorkshire will heartily agree – there were so many of them. The earliest references that we have found to the name Kay in various parts of the country are Norfolk (1197), Northants (1199), Gloucestershire (1199), London (1207), Yorkshire (1219), Lancashire (1246), Worcestershire (1275), Sussex (1296), Suffolk (1327), Staffordshire (1331), Cumberland (1484), Cambridgeshire (1492), Somerset (1500) and Lincolnshire (1506). We’ve quite clearly got Kays all over the country from early days, not all stemming from the same stock. So where did they live?
But it’s proved to be much too big to go onto one page, so it’s been broken out into several pages. The list below shows what’s here; at the top of any of these pages, you’ll see a list of the other pages to allow easy navigation.
The Different Spellings: A general look at the different spellings of the name and their use in England, Scotland and Wales
Kays in England and Wales: a map of England and Wales showing where the Kays lived.
Kays in Scotland: a map of Scotland showing where the Kays lived.
Kays in the North: a more detailed analysis of where the Kays were to be found in the north of England.
Further background detail can be found on the rest of this page.
Sources
The main sources for this article are:
- Ancestry’s analysis of the 1891 Census (http://www.ancestry.co.uk/name-origin) which analyses surnames by county.
- Our own Parish Register Database in areas where we have enough coverage to give significant results.
Also worth looking at are http://www.britishsurnames.co.uk , where you can drill down at look at the distribution of a surname at a more local level, and www.publicprofiler.org which includes a facility to search overseas. However you do have to get the surname right, and synonyms are not handled.
What’s Included
This analysis covers England (including the Isle of Man, but not the Channel Islands), Scotland and Wales. Kay and Kaye are obviously included, but we’ve gone wider than that. Our article What’s in a Name suggests a number of possible sources, and we cannot rely on spelling or locality.
- Cay is an obvious phonetic match so is included.
- So also is Key – we have a member whose surname is Key and whose ancestry can be traced to the West Riding of Yorkshire; his DNA (see Project 50) puts him firmly in the same group as many of our Kay and Kaye members, so phonetic variants on Key have to be considered valid as well.
- Keay is another spelling we’ve included as definitely being worth looking at.
- Okey, which is a synonym for Kay offered by Family Search, has not been included – there weren’t that many of them around in 1891 anyway.
- There’s no specific analysis of MacKay and McKay, although we do reference them where appropriate.
How It’s Presented
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics” [MT]. We have a mass of data which we could twist to justify anything we wanted. Our aim here is to present it as best we can, point out a few obvious facts and let you, the reader, draw your own conclusions.