Davis

Densest in the Welsh March and the West Midlands where Welsh Davids anglicised registers; equally thick in the southwest where biblical David stayed in fashion among Tudor English.

The Davis and Davies spellings ran as alternative forms of the same patronymic across the parish records of the late medieval and early modern English-Welsh border, with the Davis variant fixing in the English-side parishes of Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire and Somerset, and the Davies variant fixing in the Welsh-side parishes of Monmouthshire, Brecknockshire and Glamorgan. The split was an orthographic accident of parish-clerk handwriting rather than a genealogical distinction: the same family across two generations frequently appeared as Davis at the baptism and Davies at the burial in the surviving registers. By the 1841 Census the Davis-Davies combined patronymic was among the four most common surnames in England and Wales, on the strength of the Welsh-Davidic baptism-tradition density across the medieval-and-early-modern Welsh-border country.

American Davis-emigration patterns ran through three main channels. The Pennsylvania Quaker emigration of the 1680s and 1690s took a substantial Davis contingent from the Welsh Tract settlements of Radnor, Haverford and Merion into the Pennsylvania-Delaware Welsh-Quaker colony; the Virginia tobacco-planter emigration of the seventeenth century took a parallel Davis stream into the James River valley (Jefferson Davis the Confederate President descended through this line); the post-1845 Famine-and-industrial Welsh-Anglican emigration ran the surname into the Pennsylvania anthracite-coal valleys and the Ohio steel-and-glass towns. The American Davis distribution is, by twenty-first-century census records, in the top ten US surnames.

The Davis name carries one of the strongest senior musical-and-sporting contributions in modern English public life. Steve Davis ran six World Snooker Championships in the 1980s (1981, 1983, 1984, 1987, 1988, 1989) and was the dominant figure of the post-Higgins televised snooker decade that brought the BBC Sunday-evening sport audience into being. Sir Colin Davis conducted the London Symphony Orchestra from 1995 to 2006 across the senior post-Solti period of the orchestra. John Davis the Elizabethan navigator gave his name to the Davis Strait off Greenland on the 1585 to 1587 expeditions that broke the Northwest Passage exploration tradition. The American Bette Davis (1908–1989) won two Best Actress Academy Awards (Dangerous 1935, Jezebel 1938) and was the Warner Brothers leading actress of the 1930s and 1940s.