Evans

John was the commonest given name in the medieval West, and every language cut its own version: Latin Johannes, French Jean, Slavic Ivan, English John. Welsh had Ieuan, softened in speech to Iefan and Ifan, and the likeness between Ifan and Ivan is no accident. Welsh writes the v sound with the letter f, so Ifan is spoken "Ivan", and clerks working in English set down what they heard as Evan. Evans is the son of that man.

A second reading survives and should be stated: some derive Evan not from Ifan but from Yvain, the Latinised Norman-French form of Owain, and Owain Llawgoch was known abroad as Yvain des Galles. Either way the name reaches English out of a Welsh mouth.

Before fixed surnames a Welshman carried no family name, only his descent: his baptismal name joined by ap, or ab before a vowel, to his father's, and ferch for a daughter. The chain runs through this very name. Thomas fathered Evan, who was Evan ap Thomas; Evan fathered John, who was John ab Evan; John fathered Rees, who was Rees ap John. In 1292 forty-eight per cent of recorded Welsh names were patronymics, over seventy per cent in some parishes, and a chain could run seven generations deep, because Welsh law ran entitlement through descent. A pedigree was the document a man carried in his mouth.

When those chains froze, the pen decided the family name for good. A father called John recorded in the English form gave Jones. The same man recorded in the Welsh form, Ifan or Iefan, gave Evans. And where the ab was welded on rather than dropped, ab Ifan gave Bevan. Three of the commonest names in Wales, all meaning son of John, separated only by the clerk's language and his habit with the prefix.

Fixed surnames spread in Wales from the fifteenth century onwards, hereditary among the gentry under Henry VIII and only slowly among commoners after Wales was brought under English administration in 1536. What made the stock of names so small was a second event: after the Protestant Reformation the variety of baptismal names shrank, and because Welsh surnames were built from baptismal names, a narrow pool of first names froze into a narrow pool of surnames. Evans, Jones, Williams, Davies and Thomas were all still in the top ten recorded in England and Wales in 2000. Evans is fifth commonest in Wales, tenth in England, forty-eighth in the United States.

The consequence for anyone tracing a line is blunt: two people named Evans, even in one village, cannot be assumed to share an ancestor. Wales answered that in the nineteenth century by building second surnames from a house, a parish or the mother's family, later hyphenated. The shortage of names is the fingerprint of a whole nation registered at once.

Evans is thickest in mid and west Wales, in Ceredigion and Powys, and that is paperwork, not settlement. These are the districts where Welsh-language record-keeping lasted longest, so the Welsh form of the father's name is the one that reached the page; in rural areas the old patronymics were still in use into the early nineteenth century. The map of the surname is a map of where the language held its ground.

Welsh tradition threads the Ifan line further back still, to Ifan ab Owain Goch, named in folklore as a grandfather of Owain Glyndŵr, tying the name to the last rising of the Princes. That is tradition rather than charter evidence, but it is the story the name has long told about itself.

Industry moved the name before emigration did. Glamorganshire held 71,000 people in 1801 and 1,122,000 by 1911, and families walked out of the western parishes into its pits and terraces. Others went to Liverpool and Ashton-in-Makerfield, which is why so many English families carry Welsh surnames.

The sea took the rest, often straight out of Evans country. In 1819 the ship Albion left Cardigan for New Brunswick with twenty-seven Cardiganshire farming families aboard. In 1852 Thomas Benbow Phillips of Tregaron founded a settlement of about a hundred Welsh people in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Contract miners went to the coal towns of the Pas-de-Calais; others to Pennsylvania, and to Malad City in Idaho, a Welsh Mormon settlement that still claims more people of Welsh descent, proportionally, than anywhere outside Wales. Some 1.75 million Americans report Welsh ancestry, and 458,705 Canadians did so in 2011, against 2.9 million people living in Wales.

Mary Anne Evans (1819–1880), a Warwickshire land agent's daughter descended from a Welsh-borders branch of the name, translated the German biblical critics, edited the Westminster Review and published as George Eliot. Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss and Daniel Deronda made her the foundational moral realist of the English novel.

Sir Arthur Evans (1851–1941) began digging at Knossos in 1900, uncovered the Throne Room and gave a lost European civilisation the name Minoan. Sir Geraint Evans (1922–1992) carried the Welsh voice onto the great opera stages as one of the finest baritones of his century, and Edith Evans (1888–1976) held the English stage for half a century, remembered above all in The Importance of Being Earnest. For a name that began as a clerk's shorthand for somebody's father, that is a considerable inheritance.