Andrews

Son of Andrew, apostle, patron saint, common name.

Origin: London, England
Famous bearer: Thomas Andrews (1873–1912), Belfast naval architect; chief designer of RMS Titanic; went down with the ship on the night of 14–15 April 1912
Register: English family

Territory of Andrews

CoreHistoric reach

The seat of Andrews

Seat vacant

Chief

No one leads the Andrews community yet. When the movement opens, you can stand for its leadership, or help elect whoever does.

Current mission

No shared goal set yet. Once Andrews has leadership, it sets the public focus: a restoration, a gathering, a real-world project that helps its own.

The Andrews clan is being rebuilt. Join the waiting list for the movement today, and you help decide who leads it and what it does.

Help rebuild the Andrews clan →

What does the Andrews name mean?

Patronymic, son of Andrew (Greek Andreas, 'manly'). Andrew was a common mediaeval Christian first name on account of the apostle, and through him on account of Saint Andrew the patron saint of Scotland. The patronymic Andrews is densely English in modern distribution, though the surname is also strong in Scotland and Northern Ireland through the Saint-Andrew association.

The history of Andrews

Andrews is among the top-100 English surnames, with strong distributions across the southern counties and the West Country. The Andrews family of Lathbury, Buckinghamshire, was a 17th-century Catholic gentry family; the Andrews of Norwich and the Andrews of Pembrokeshire were 18th-century mercantile lines. By the Victorian era the surname was diffused across the Anglophone world.

Julie Andrews (Julia Wells, b. 1935), the Walton-on-Thames-born actress and singer, won the 1964 Best Actress Oscar for Mary Poppins and starred as Maria von Trapp in The Sound of Music (1965); she was created Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2000. V.C. Andrews (Cleo Virginia Andrews, 1923–1986), the Portsmouth, Virginia-born novelist of Flowers in the Attic (1979), wrote one of the bestselling Gothic-horror series in American publishing. Roy Chapman Andrews (1884–1960), the Wisconsin-born paleontologist, led the American Museum of Natural History expeditions to Mongolia in the 1920s that found the first dinosaur eggs.

Champions of the Andrews name

The bearers whose lives are inseparable from this surname. Each has its own page — biography, achievements, geography, connection to the family.

Step Into History

Walk the streets and seats the Andrews name knew — a photoreal walk through time, on foot.

Step Into History · New

Walk London in 1818Enter →

St Paul's, Covent Garden and the gaslit West End — Regency London, soot-hazed and horse-drawn.

Notable bearers of the Andrews name

Thomas Andrews (1873–1912), Belfast naval architect; chief designer of RMS Titanic; went down with the ship on the night of 14–15 April 1912
Julie Andrews (b. 1935), actress, singer (Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music)
V.C. Andrews (1923–1986), novelist (Flowers in the Attic)
Roy Chapman Andrews (1884–1960), paleontologist

Stories of Andrews

Thomas Andrews on the Titanic
1912
At twenty minutes to midnight on the night of Sunday the fourteenth of April 1912, on the four-hundred-mile mid-Atlantic crossing between the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and the Nantucket Lightship, the White Star Line's new flagship RMS Titanic, three days out of Southampton on her maiden voyage to New York, struck an iceberg on her starboard bow at a position approximately three hundred and seventy nautical miles south-south-east of Cape Race, Newfoundland. Aboard the ship was Thomas Andrews, thirty-nine years old, the Belfast-born managing director and chief designer at Harland & Wolff who had been the lead naval architect on the Titanic's design through the four years of her construction at the Queen's Island shipyard on the Lagan; he had sailed with the Guarantee Group of eight Harland & Wolff engineers to observe the maiden voyage and to note any final modifications required by the ship's operational performance. Andrews went forward to the bridge with Captain Edward Smith at five minutes after midnight on the fifteenth of April, inspected the forward damage with the Captain over the next ten minutes, calculated that the iceberg had ripped a three-hundred-foot gash along the starboard hull below the waterline that had penetrated the forward five watertight compartments, and informed the Captain at twenty-five past midnight that the ship would sink in approximately ninety minutes (his actual sinking-time estimate, recorded in the Mersey Inquiry transcript of June 1912, was an hour and a half from the moment of impact). The Titanic actually sank at two-twenty in the morning of the fifteenth of April, two hours and forty minutes after the impact, and slightly longer than Andrews's estimate on the strength of the slower-than-predicted flooding through the bulkheads. Andrews spent the next two hours moving through the ship organising the launch of the lifeboats and personally escorting passengers to the boats. He was last seen alive at approximately two-ten in the morning, ten minutes before the ship went down, standing alone in the first-class smoking room on A-deck, his Harland & Wolff naval-architect's lifejacket beside him on a chair, staring at the painting Approach to the New World over the smoking-room mantelpiece. His body was never recovered.
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Frequently asked

What does the surname Andrews mean?

Where does the Andrews family come from?

The Andrews family is rooted in London and South East, in England. Within that, the name was particularly concentrated in London and Kent. The atlas page for the name records the historical territory it has held over the centuries.

Where did the Andrews family historically hold territory?

At its greatest historical extent, the Andrews name has been concentrated in Surrey and Berkshire & Oxfordshire. The atlas page distinguishes the core territory of the name from this wider historical reach with hatched silhouettes on the map.

Is Andrews a England surname?

Yes, Andrews is a England surname. Its editorial home in this atlas is England, where the historical territory and family record of the name are concentrated.

How old is the Andrews surname?

Andrews is among the top-100 English surnames, with strong distributions across the southern counties and the West Country. European hereditary surnames crystallised broadly between the 12th and 14th centuries, and the Andrews name took its modern form within that long settlement.

What is the Andrews family known for?

Son of Andrew, apostle, patron saint, common name. Andrews is among the top-100 English surnames, with strong distributions across the southern counties and the West Country.

Who is the most famous Andrews?

The best-known bearer of the Andrews name is Thomas Andrews (1873–1912), Belfast naval architect; chief designer of RMS Titanic; went down with the ship on the night of 14–15 April 1912. Other prominent figures of the family include Julie Andrews (b. 1935), actress, singer (Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music), V.C. Andrews (1923–1986), novelist (Flowers in the Attic) and Roy Chapman Andrews (1884–1960), paleontologist.

Who are some famous Andrewses?

Notable bearers of the Andrews name include Thomas Andrews (1873–1912), Belfast naval architect; chief designer of RMS Titanic; went down with the ship on the night of 14–15 April 1912, Julie Andrews (b. 1935), actress, singer (Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music), V.C. Andrews (1923–1986), novelist (Flowers in the Attic) and Roy Chapman Andrews (1884–1960), paleontologist. Each is profiled on the family page, with cross-links to the geography, stories, and historical events tied to their life.

What stories are told about the Andrews family?

The Andrews family is associated with Thomas Andrews on the Titanic. Each story has its own page on this site with the full account, the date, the location, and the other families involved.

What is the story of Thomas Andrews on the Titanic?

At twenty minutes to midnight on the night of Sunday the fourteenth of April 1912, on the four-hundred-mile mid-Atlantic crossing between the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and the Nantucket Lightship, the White Star Line's new flagship RMS Titanic, three days out of Southampton on her maiden voyage to New York, struck an iceberg on her starboard bow at a position approximately three hundred and seventy nautical miles south-south-east of Cape Race, Newfoundland. Aboard the ship was Thomas Andrews, thirty-nine years old, the Belfast-born managing director and chief designer at Harland & Wolff who had been the lead naval architect on the Titanic's design through the four years of her construction at the Queen's Island shipyard on the Lagan; he had sailed with the Guarantee Group of eight Harland & Wolff engineers to observe the maiden voyage and to note any final modifications required by the ship's operational performance. The event is dated to 1912.

Where is the Andrews surname found today?

England is the primary historical home of the Andrews surname. In the modern era, the name is also borne across the wider diaspora, particularly in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, where families carry the line of descent from the same England origin recorded on this page.

What does the Clan Rising page for the Andrews family cover?

The Clan Rising page for the Andrews family covers the meaning of the surname, the historical geography of the name, famous bearers of the name, traditional stories and the seat of the head of the family. Each section is linked to the underlying atlas of England so the name can be read in the geography that shaped it.

Who is the head of the Andrews family today?

The seat for the head of the Andrews family is currently vacant on this register. Clan Rising is rebuilding the chief and family structure for the modern era, and the family page allows readers to claim the seat or pledge to the name.