No-one seems interested in answering where our name comes from so here goes:
It is tempting to think that the name
Shears has an occupation connotation like
Hunter or
Tucker but that is not very likely. The very large number of variations suggest that the more probable origin is the Old
English (Anglo
Saxon) word scir which would have been pronounced ‘sheer’ and it had two distinct shades of meaning: the first meaning ‘bright’ or ‘gleaming’ as in ‘sheer fabrics’ or in place names such as Shearwater, Shirwell or
Sherborne which was originally spent ‘Scirburn’. The other meaning suggested ‘county’ as in modern ‘shire’. Another OE word ‘scieran’ had a sense of ‘to cut’ and became the modern word ‘shear’. The first of these seems to be most likely source of our name and which led to so many variations and its reference would be to hair colouring i.e. light hair. (Might that be a Viking?)
The spelling of names has always been capricious, mainly because the majority of the population were illiterate and those who could write spelled as they heard. Thus the first names in the series would have been
Shear,
Shere, Sheere, Sheir,
Shier,
Shire, Schire, Shyre,
Shyer etc. At a fairly early stage the alternations with a ‘s’ on the end would have appeared, as a mark of familiarity or affection. These spellings would have been influences by regional accents and even as late as the middle of the 19th century
Shears was very much more common in
Devon for instance than in
Yorkshire where
Shires was the prevalent form. It seems that as the name moved further north the pronunciation became disyllabic giving rise to forms such as Shiress, Shirres, Shirras, Sherris and any other permutation with one or two r’s and one or two s’s and alternations of ‘i’ with ‘e’ and occasionally ‘a’. These are the prevalent forms in
Scotland. Ignoring geographical distribution, during the century 1750 - 1850, of all those ending in ‘s’ by far the most common was
Shires (about 28%) followed by
Shears (about 19%). In USA
Shear is more common that
Shears.
There are currently a little over 3000
Shears living in
England and
Wales, approximately 10% of those in south
Devon, and there are approximately 3500
Shears in USA with about 10% of those in
California. There are probably two in Eire and one family in Northern Ireland. There appear to be no
Shears living in
Scotland.
The busiest centre in
Devon was and still is Brixham (a fishing port)and there are significant nuclei of
Shears in most ports up as far as Hartlepool on the east coast and Bangor on the west coast, clearly suggesting that these were seamen, probably fishermen, moving further afield seeking work. This can be confirmed by tracing ancestry of residents of some of these places. However there are significant nuclei away from the coast, at
Salisbury, Rugby and Chertsey in particular.
I belong to the Chertsey lot that moved into SW
London.
The next question is “How did they get there?”
