I couldn't see the 'thorn' in my Email reader either, but there it is in your post. In contrast, the table I posted (above) used tabs to separate the columns, and the message board couldn't handle the tab characters, making the table look incoherent on the board. But it was laid out in nice neat columns in the Email version that was sent to the list. Go figure.
The
Thrift one-name study page has some clues about the distributions of Thrifts & Friths in
England.
http://www.one-name.org/profiles/thrift.html#distributionNote there can be differences in what you see, depending on whether you are looking at figures that are normalized or not (i.e. % of the population vs. absolute numbers). The high population density around
London exaggerates that region in non-normalized figures.
Compare the non-normalized distributions from 1891 here (open two windows and switch back & forth)
http://www.ancestry.co.uk/facts/Thrift-family-history-uk.ash...http://www.ancestry.co.uk/facts/Firth-family-history-uk.ashxYou can move your mouse over an area to see the name of the region. The distribution of Thrifts is totally unlike that of Firths: Kent-London-Surrey-Middlesex vs
Yorkshire.
It takes a bit more effort to see normalized distributions, but these maps are much more detailed. Open this site in two different windows
http://www.nationaltrustnames.org.uk/In one window, enter
Thrift, and in the other enter
Frith (after clicking in the black circle, and choose 1891). Once you get to the maps, go back and forth between the two windows, to see how vastly the distributins differ. Again, move your mouse over a region to see the (postal code) name. (It's also interesting to compare 1891 vs 1998 for a single name.)
(Some laptop screens don't show the lightest shades well, you may need to adjust the viewing angle to see them.)
[The idea that "the names
Frith and
Thrift were used completely interchangeably in the 1600's" is one of several unfounded assertions of Mike Thrift's "From James
Towne 1607 to NC 1997". That comment is incorrect. The ms also contains many fascinating and previously not-well-documented facts of interest to Thrifts in the region, but it's often hard to tell the grounded facts from the ungrounded assertions.]
Back to
England, consider that in 1841 there were ~10-20 times as many Friths as Thrifts. There should be a
TON of Thrifts in
Yorkshire where the Firths hung out. But there aren't, so in
England either there was a plague on Thrifts in
Yorkshire (and on Friths in Kent) OR the surname
Thrift generally arose independently of the
Frith population. It is also likely that different regions of
England had particular linguistic tendencies which led to different variations, and those of us across the ocean are quite unfamiliar with the linguistic differences.
I mentioned in an earlier post that Tom Hickathrift of Cambridgeshire and Norfolk legend was also called Hicafric, which suggests that -thrift may have evolved from -fric instead of -frith in this case.
