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| Origins Available: |
| | England |
The name Rayford is of Anglo-Saxon origin and came from when a family lived beside a marsh or reedy ford. Rayford is a topographic surname, which was given to a person who resided near a physical feature such as a hill, stream, church, or type of tree. Habitation names form the other broad category of surnames that were derived from place-names. They were derived from pre-existing names for towns, villages, parishes, or farmsteads.
The surname Rayford was first found in Devon where they held a family seat from early times and their first records appeared on the early census rolls taken by the early Kings of Britain to determine the rate of taxation of their subjects.
This web page shows only a small excerpt of our Rayford research. Another 64 words (5 lines of text) covering the years 1561 and 1630 are included under the topic Early Rayford History in all our PDF Extended History products and printed products wherever possible.
Sound was what guided spelling in the essentially pre-literate Middle Ages, so one person's name was often recorded under several variations during a single lifetime. Also, before the advent of the printing press and the first dictionaries, the English language was not standardized. Therefore, spelling variations were common, even among the names of the most literate people. Known variations of the Rayford family name include Radford, Ratford and others.
More information is included under the topic Early Rayford Notables in all our PDF Extended History products and printed products wherever possible.
In the United States, the name Rayford is the 4,414th most popular surname with an estimated 7,461 people with that name. 1
For political, religious, and economic reasons, thousands of English families boarded ships for Ireland, the Canadas, the America colonies, and many of smaller tropical colonies in the hope of finding better lives abroad. Although the passage on the cramped, dank ships caused many to arrive in the New World diseased and starving, those families that survived the trip often went on to make valuable contributions to those new societies to which they arrived. Early immigrants bearing the Rayford surname or a spelling variation of the name include :