Barnes Surname Meaning, History & Origin

Barnes Surname Meaning

The most obvious source for the surname Barnes is locational, describing someone who lives by a barn. 

However, Barnes may have earlier and very different Saxon or Norman origins.  The Saxon word broon, meaning “warrior,” or the Norse personal name bjorn, meaning “bear” or “warrior,” gave rise to early forms of the name such as Barn, Barne, and Berne that were prevalent in pre-Domesday times.  The Barnes surname probably had different origins, depending on where it occurred in England. 

Barnes Surname Resources on The Internet

Barnes Surname Ancestry

  • from England (London and Lancashire)
  • to America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand

England.  The two main locations for the Barnes surname were London and Lancashire.

London and SE England.  The place-name Barnes near London appeared as Berne in the Domesday Book and gave rise to some early Barnes surnames:

  • John Barnes was a London mercer and Lord Mayor of London in 1371.  This John Barnes “gave a chest with three locks and one thousand marks therein, to be lent to poor young men.”
  • while George Barne was a London haberdasher around the year 1500.  His son George was one of the merchant adventurers of his age and Lord Mayor of London in 1552, as was his son George in 1586.

The Barnes name also cropped up at an early time in Essex – at Writtle near Chelmsford, at Thoby, and also at Barking.  William Barnes of Thoby prospered at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530’s. He held land from Henry VIII in the royal forest of Tillingham on the Essex coast.

Henry Barnes was a cloth-maker in London in the 1700’s whose grandson Thomas Barnes became the editor of The Times in 1817 and established its reputation as a newspaper.  Meanwhile one family history recounts the Barnes who were farm workers near Heckfield in Hampshire in the late 17th century and moved to London in the 1860’s.

By the time of the 1881 English census, an estimated 35% of the Barnes in England was in London and the southeast.

Lancashire.  Roughly the same share was to be found in the north, mainly in Lancashire. Richard Barnes, born at Bold near St. Helens in Lancashire in 1532, became the Anglican bishop of Durham. His sister Catherine married Francis Bold of Bold Hall.  His son Barnabe, a poet, was a contemporary of Shakespeare in London.

From a later generation came James Rothwell Barnes who was influential in the growth of Farnworth as an industrial town in Lancashire in the 19th century.  He built Farnworth’s first steam weaving mill and in 1832 introduced cotton spinning there.

In the 1881 census the Barnes name was particularly prevalent in Haslingden and in Accrington, towns some 20 miles north of Manchester.

Scotland. Barnes in Scotland, first found in Aberdeenshire and Dundee, could have derived its name from the Gaelic word bairn meaning “noble child.”  Early spellings were Bairnis and Barnis.  By the 1600’s the name had spread to Edinburgh and Glasgow.  

Ireland.  Barnes in Ireland probably came originally from either England or Scotland.  The Barnes name has occurred in Ulster and in Offaly and Waterford.  Thomas Barnes was an English Quaker who settled in Waterford in the early 1700’s; while J.B. Barnes who moved to Newfoundland in the 1760’s was thought to have come from Waterford.

America.  Early Barnes were to be found in New England.

New England.  The early Barnes here were called Thomas Barnes, whether he were Thomas of Hartford, Thomas of New Haven, or Thomas of Hingham, Massachusetts.  Thomas of New Haven who came as a boy has left probably the largest number of Barnes descendants in America.

Meanwhile three Barnes brothers, led by Joshua Barnes, were in Long Island by the late 1640’s.  From another Barnes line came Richard Barnes to East Greenwich, Connecticut.

Maryland.   James Barnes was transported from England to Maryland on the Cecilius in 1676.  Through his later marriage to Ketura Shipley, he became the owner of land known as Shipley’s Choice on the south side of the Severn river in Anne Arundel county.  His son Adam was a prominent landowner in Howard county, also thanks to his marriage.

Abraham Barnes from Surrey came around 1700 and settled in St. Mary’s county.  It was said that he brought with him a portrait of Colonel John Barnes of the British army who was probably an ancestor.  His descendants became prominent in Maryland society.  The Barnes home in Leonardtown, now styled Tudor Hall, was completed in 1745.

Elsewhere.  Some Scots Irish Barnes were early settlers in Kentucky.  Brinsley Barnes, born in Dublin, was one of the heroes of the Revolutionary War. His descendants through Edward Barnes were to be found in Estill county:

“The defining characteristic of these Barnes has been the ‘Barnes temper.’  This peculiarly Barnes trait, believed to have been inherited through Viking blood, has caused the demise of more than a few family members. The tendency for male members of the clan to ‘die with their boots on’ has continued into the modern era.”

John Barns, Scots Irish from Armagh, came to upstate New York in 1760 and made his home in Salem.  His son John was a captain in the Revolutionary War.  Later Barns settled in Cayuga county and the spelling became Barnes.

William Barnes from England arrived in Albany, New York in 1847, but departed ten years later with his wife and family for Iowa.  In 1861 they set out with their ox-drawn wagon for the West Coast on the Oregon trail.  After an eventful passage, they landed at The Dalles and then traveled by boat down the Columbia river, arriving at Portland in the fall of the year. 

In the 1880’s their son Frank started a bustling grocery market in Portland which made him wealthy.  His impressive Barnes Mansion on the outskirts of town was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983.   

Canada.  J.B. Barnes, according to family lore, came to Newfoundland from Waterford in Ireland in the 1760’s. J.B. Barnes and Company became prominent shipbuilders in St. John’s.  His grandson Richard was active in local politics in the 1840’s, but died at a young age.  William Morris Barnes was a sea captain who later wrote an autobiography entitled When Ships Were Ships.

John Barnes was among the Loyalists that had come by ship from New York to Shelburne, Nova Scotia in 1783.  He had been a distiller in Trenton, New Jersey and the last colonial sheriff of Hunterdon county.

In 1866 William Barnes ran away from home in Somerset at the age of fourteen and ended up in Newfoundland as a fisherman for Newman and Company at Head Bay d’Espoir.  His descendants held a family reunion there in 2013.

South Africa.  James Barnes from London came out with his mother to the Eastern Cape in one of the 1820 settler parties.  He and his wife Sarah, whom he married around 1830, made their home at Grahamstown.  The family story has been covered in Pamela Barnes’ 1984 book Barnes Ancestry: The Story of an 1820 British Settler Family.

Australia.  Henry Barnes, a farm laborer from Northamptonshire, departed with his family on the Berkshire and arrived in South Australia in 1857 in the hopes of a better life.  Unfortunately that did not happen to him and he later drowned in the Torrens river.  However, his son Henry did better, moving to Adelaide and working for most of his life on the local newspaper there.

Alfred Barnes from Yorkshire, who came to Australia in 1850, also settled in Adelaide after a spell in the Victoria gold fields.  He was reported to have been the first man to run coaches from the port to the town of Adelaide where he ran the Marion Hotel.

New Zealand.  William Barnes, a farm laborer from Kent, was an early settler in Wellington.  He and his family received a free passage there on the Prince Rupert in 1841.  However, the vessel was wrecked off the Cape of Good Hope and they had to wait two years before they were able to continue to New Zealand.  His line continued with his son Thomas who was aged fourteen at the time of their eventful voyage.

Barnes Surname Miscellany

Barnes in England.  H.B. Guppy described the Barnes surname as follows in his 1890 book Homes of Family Names in Great Britain.

“An ancient name of pre-Domesday times. Its wide area of distribution includes two principal homes – one in the south of England in the contiguous counties of Dorset, Hampshire and Wiltshire, the other in the north of England in Cumberland, Westmoreland, and Lancashire.”

The Barnes of Writtle.  The Barnes of Writtle near Chelmsford in Essex were originally Berners and were said to have been descended from Hugh de Berners whose name had appeared in the 1086 Domesday Book.

The first of these Berners was probably Thomas Berners, born in Writtle around the year 1360.  The family held the manor of Turges or Sturgeons.  John Berners or Barnes of Turges died in Writtle in 1525.His son John Barnes sold the estate soon afterwards and moved to Hertfordshire.  John’s brother William prospered at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries and was able to acquire for himself lands in Essex and elsewhere.

Barnes in Haslingden.  Haslingden is a town in what was once the forest of Rossendale some twenty miles north of Manchester.  The Barnes name first appeared there in 1557 when Ralph, Isabel and William Barnes were recorded as letting 21 acres to farm.  Barnes were yeoman farmers in the 17th and 18th centuries.  Joseph Barnes is thought to have left Haslingden for New England around the year 1694.

By the late 18th century, handloom weaving had become an important occupation in that area and for Barnes.  For example:

  • Richard Barnes of Haslingden specified in his will of 1788 that “I do hereby order my executors that they give and deliver to Henry Barnes, son of John Barnes, one pair of woollen looms with the implements thereof belonging and to remain his and his heirs forever.”
  • while James Barnes in the 1798 rate survey at Haslingden Grane was recorded as a weaver at his cottage there.

The 19th century found a Barnes family as inn-keepers in Haslingden, first in 1809 and later, at the New Black Dog Inn, in 1868.  By the time of the 1881 census the town of Haslingden had the highest concentration of the Barnes name in England.

The Barnes Memorial in Farnworth.  James Rothwell Barnes from Bolton had established one of the first cotton mills in the nearby village of Farnworth in 1828 and it was his son, Thomas, who took over and further expanded the business after his father’s death in 1849.

In 1860 Thomas announced his intention of providing a park for the community.  The park was built and handed over in 1864 in a ceremony that would have been a red-letter day in a town the size of Liverpool or Manchester, let alone a small village with a population of just 8,000.  The platform contained some of Lancashire’s most powerful and influential figures who had all come to see Gladstone open the park and, of course, speak.

In 1895 Thomas Barnes was still alive and the local authorities decided to honor him with a bronze statue depicting him at the time of the park’s opening.

Barnes in Long Island.  William Barnes of East Winch in Norfolk was reported to have had eighteen children by two wives.

A tradition handed down by Barnes descendants is that three of the sons and two of the daughters by his second wife came to New England sometime in the 1630’s.  The sons were said to have been Joshua, Charles and William.  The daughters have not been traced.

The three Barnes brothers eventually made their way to Long Island.  Joshua, who had first arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1632, was first recorded on Long Island in 1649, having arriving at Southampton from Cape Cod on his own boat.  He made his home in Southampton and died there sometime around 1685.

Charles and William were clearly brothers (although some have disputed whether Joshua was also their brother).  Charles was the first school teacher in East Hampton.  William had a less happy time.  He and his wife were divorced in 1648 (an almost unheard-of matter in those days) and he also fell out with Charles.  He returned to England in 1658 and died three years laterMeanwhile Charles and his family later settled in Middletown, Connecticut.

Reader Feedback – Barnes in Maryland.  How about the Barnes in Anne Arundel county, Maryland?  My 6th grandfather was there in the late 1600’s. These Barnes married into the Shipleys and Dorseys.

Byron Barnes (bybarnes@embarqmail.com).

Colonel Barnes at Leonardtown.  The Georgian-style Tudor Hall mansion overlooks Breton Bay in Maryland.  It was built by Colonel Abraham Barnes on a 1,100 acre Tidewater plantation that shared boundaries with the port and county seat of Leonardtown.

The house, started sometime before 1744, was small with a central hall and a room on either side.  The second floor had dormered bedrooms and there were outhouses, typical of plantation homes at that time, containing a kitchen, laundry unit, a garden house, and slave quarters.

Colonel Barnes was active in defending the port of Leonardtown against English attacks in 1775 but died later on in the Revolutionary War.  His estate was bequeathed to his youngest son Richard. Tudor Hall was sold to the Key family in 1817.  It now houses the St. Mary’s Historical Society. 

The Barnes Mansion in Portland, Oregon. Frank Barnes built the Barnes Mansion between 1910 and 1914 on a promontory between the east and west sides of Portland. It is said that he did it to attract prospective husbands for his five daughters.  His daughters, however, were all married before the mansion was finished.

The mansion was so placed to prove that the east side of Portland was every bit as good as the west, and also to spite Barnes’s rival Henry Pittock, the newspaper magnate and entrepreneur, to obstruct his view from the Pittock Mansion on the west side.

One daughter Belle Barnes married the founder of the Portland Fish Co. and their mansion still stands in the Alameda district of Portland. They also had canneries in Alaska and a son, Frank, was up in Alaska and met a tragic end, being killed by a bear!

Captain William Morris Barnes.  Captain William Morris Barnes was born in 1850 into a shipowning family in St Johns, Newfoundland.  He first went to sea when he was only eleven.  His career seemed predestined and by the age of 14 he was apprenticed to a Liverpool company, serving in their sailing ships working a triangular passage to St Johns, the Brazils and back to Liverpool.

He tried to ‘swallow the anchor’ when he married.  But running a grocery store was too mundane and he soon went back to sea, transferring his skills to the now dominant steamships.

At the outbreak of the First World War, even though he was 64, he promptly volunteered for service.  The authorities told him to go home as he was too old.  But he kept pestering them until they eventually gave in.   During his war he was mined or torpedoed three times.  On the last occasion he was badly injured and spent three days adrift in an open boat.

His various adventures were the subject of an autobiography When Ships Were Ships, written by Hilda Renbold Wortman from Barnes’s own stories and recollections when he was 79.  The book came out in 1930. Their collaboration became the inspiration for Denys Wortman’s popular cartoon character of the Depression era, Mopey Dick.   Barnes himself died four years later in 1934 in New York.

Misfortune followed the Barnes family after his death.  Everything was lost during the Depression and the Barnes boys were sent away to an orphanage.  One Barnes ran away at 14 and joined the US Merchant Marine as a cabin boy. History obviously repeating itself!

Henry Barnes’ Sad Demise in South AustraliaThe SA Police Gazette and Register reported the following in March 1886:

“It appears that Henry Barnes senior had a rather sad demise. He drowned in Torrens Lake. This might have been considered an unfortunate accident if not for a large rock found inside his shirt.

It was reported to the South Australia coroner’s court that Henry had been frustrated at being unable to find employment because of his age and had gone to sleep in the sun on a hot day in February on the banks of the Torrens river. He was reported missing and his body was found some days later. The coroner concluded that Henry had drowned whilst ‘in a state of unsound mind, the effects of a previous attack of sunstroke.’”

Barnes Names

  • Robert Barnes  was a Protestant reformer who was burnt at the stake for his beliefs in 1540.
  • Thomas Barnes was editor of The Times from 1817 to 1841 and made it a newspaper of repute.
  • Sydney Barnes from Staffordshire is regarded as one of the best cricket bowlers who has ever lived.
  • William Barnes joined forces with Clifford Noble in New York in 1917 to start the Barnes & Noble book chain.
  • Clive Barnes was the renowned theater critic for the New York Times from 1978 until his death in 2008.
  • John Barnes was a Jamaican-born footballer who played for England in the 1980’s.
  • Julian Barnes is an English writer who won the Man Booker prize for his book The Sense of an Ending in 2011.

Barnes Numbers Today

  • 64,000 in the UK (most numerous in Yorkshire)
  • 84,000 in America (most numerous in Texas)
  • 37,000 elsewhere (most numerous in Australia)

Barnes and Like Surnames

These names are locational, describing someone who lived in those medieval times by the side of a bank, or by a barn or a lane or a shaw (which means a wood) or a wood and so forth.  Both the oak tree and the ash tree have in fact provided locational surnames – Oakes and Nash (from atten Ash).  Here are some of these locational surnames that you can check out.

BanksFieldMeadShaw
BarnesFordMooreStone
BrooksHillNashWells
CrossLaneRhodesWood


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Written by Colin Shelley

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