Burton
The fortified farmstead, a name from a hundred villages.
- Origin
- West Midlands, England
- Famous bearer
- Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890), explorer and translator
- Register
- English family
CoreHistoric reach
The seat of Burton
Seat vacantChief
No one leads the Burton 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 Burton has leadership, it sets the public focus: a restoration, a gathering, a real-world project that helps its own.
The Burton 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 Burton clan →What does the Burton name mean?
Locational, from Old English burh-tun, a 'fortified farmstead' or the home-farm attached to a stronghold. Burton place-names are scattered the length of England, the most famous being Burton upon Trent in Staffordshire, whose hard gypsum-rich water made it the brewing capital of England. A Burton family is named for whichever of those many villages it came from.
The history of Burton
With so many parishes called Burton, the surname has many roots rather than one, each a household named for the manor it left. The midland clusters around Staffordshire and Derbyshire are the deepest, in the country that brewing would later make synonymous with the name.
Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890), the explorer, linguist and translator of the Arabian Nights and the Kama Sutra, who reached Mecca in disguise and sought the source of the Nile, is the towering Victorian bearer. The American filmmaker Tim Burton (b. 1958) directed Edward Scissorhands and Batman; the Yorkshire cyclist Beryl Burton (1937–1996) dominated women's racing for fully two decades, often beating the men's times of her day.
Notable bearers of the Burton name
- Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890), explorer and translator
- Tim Burton (b. 1958), American filmmaker
- Beryl Burton (1937–1996), champion cyclist