Haberfield

This is a surname which is very well recorded in the early surviving church registers of the city of London. It appears as Haberfield and occasionally Habberfield, and is clearly locational from a place of that name. Unfortunately research through the known gazetters of the past three centuries has failed to find any such place in the same spelling as the surname. This suggests that either the place itself is one of the several thousand 'lost' villages of the British Isles. That is to say places whch are known to have existed seven centuries ago, but have now disappeared, or the spelling has changed and is no longer immediately identifiable. With this name the most likely possibility in regard to existing place names is the town of Arborfield in Berkshire. Believed to mean 'the site of the Roman camp' this was recorded as Herburgfeld in the 13th century, around the time when 'modern' surnames were coming in to use. Allowing for the variations in spelling and dialect over the centuries, this seems to be a logical choice. Locational surnames are usually 'from' names, that is to say names given to people after they left their original homes to move somewhere else. In this case examples of the surname recording in the early church registers of the citry of London include Jane Haberfield, the daughter of Edward Haberfield, who was christened at St Andrews Holborn on November 8th 1683, and that of Ann Habberfield, who married Alexander Tothill at St Pancras Old Church, on November 17th 1822.