What kind of name is "Swezey"?

For a long time I could only trace my family name back to my great-grandfather Samuel George Swezey who was born in Akron, Ohio.

So whenever people used to asked me, "what kind of name is Swezey?", I would jokingly tell them it was "Akronian".

From  John L. Swesey's write up, I now know that the Swezey's trace back to Bridport, Dorsetshire, England and to Normandy, France before that.

This lead me to look in a French/English dictionary to see if there were any French words from which Swezey/Swesey might have been derived.

In fact there are very few French words starting with 'S' but the most interesting is "Suisse" which means "Swiss" or "Switzerland".

Consequently, my best guess is that "Swezey/Swesey" is an Angloized/Americanized version of "Suisse".

Of course this is only conjecture and I am open to other suggestions.



Interestingly, I ran across this entry regarding the Swayze family in:

New Dictionary of American Family Names, by Elsdon C. Smith, page 500.

"Swayze (English) means one who came from Swavesey (Swaef's landing place) in Cambridgeshire."


Since Cambridgeshire is north of London and nowhere near Dorsetshire, and since the Swezey/Sweseys have been documented to have come from Normandy, France. I am forced to assume that the Swayze family is a different family from mine and totally unrelated.


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