Statutory register - parents included?

[Forfarian]

Innes is a Scottish surname, pronounced INN-ess. It comes from the barony of Innes, in the parish of Urquhart, Moray, and is derived from the Gaelic word innis, which roughly means flat land beside a river, like a flood plain or water meadow, or an island. There are loads of Scottish places with inch or insh or insch in their names.

In a survey done in 1990, Innes was the 60th commonest surname both in what used to be Grampian Region, which included Moray, and in what used to be Lothian Region. It didn't make the top 100 surnames in Scotland as a whole.

It's much rarer as a given name than as a surname. According to Scotland's People, there are 563 surviving baptism records of children before the start of statutory registration in 1855 with Innes as one of their names, of whom just 114 were given Innes as their only name, and most of them were male.

(Where did Bowdidge come from?)

[Gallicrow]

Thanks Forfarian.So Innes when used as a given name is pronounced the same way as the surname, which the late Neil Innes made familiar to many.

Bowdidge (my mother's maiden name) originated, I think, in Dorset. It's a rare enough name that whenever I come across a record of a Bowdidge I try to trace the person and his family back to my own family tree. I was doing just that last night when I stumbled across someone called Philip Bowdidge who is an expert (still living) on matchbox cars (I was looking at eBay auctions). I quickly traced his family back a few generations to one of the main sources of Bowdidges - the village of Wootton Fitzpaine.

[Forfarian]

Did you type Bowdidge by mistake for McIntosh in Reply #8 above, then?

[Gallicrow]

Ah! I see, my mistake. I've modified that message now. I assumed you had got the name Bowdidge from the bottom of my messages.

[Forfarian]

Yes, that was what was confusing me