Calling England! How did the Ruddington Bloods or Blouds spelling their surname?

Question

We have a duplicate that needs merging and are trying to determine last name at birth. The earliest record we've found so far is 1640 Massachusetts birth of a child, where the father's surname is listed as Bloud. By the end of his life, he spelled it Blood.

LDS has microfilmed the church records (which start 1628), but we can't get at them online, and they haven't opened their family history centers yet.

Is there anyone with access to Ruddington church records, who could look for some early Bloods or Blouds and see if there is any consistency in how they spelled their surname, say until 1650?

Many thanks!

Comments

In the period 1583 to 1647 the following spellings were used to refer to Ruddington Bloods: Blood, Bloode, Bloud, Bloude, Bloudde, Blud, Blude, Bludd, and Bludde. Bear in mind these were how scribes or clerks spelt these people's names, and might have had little relation to how they themselves would have spelt them, assuming they could spell at all. Overall it's about evenly split between Blood-, Bloud-, and Blud- spellings. The pronunciation at the time probably rhymed with food.

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As a follow-up and for the record, I've done a count of 39 instances of the name Blood in records from or pertaining to people from Ruddington in the period up to 1650. Here's the spellings by percentage:

Blood or Bloode - 49%

Blude, Bludd, Bludde - 35% (note: spelling 'Blud' not found)

Bloud, Bloude, Bloudde - 16%

If we look across all of Nottinghamshire for the same period (100 examples, including the Ruddington numbers), it's about the same distribution:

Blood or Bloode - 51%

Blud, Blude, Bludd, Bludde - 32%

Bloud, Bloude, Bloudde - 17%

Ultimately, all these variant spellings disappeared by the late 1600s, leaving only 'Blood.'

Keep in mind that many if not most of these people were illiterate so this is not how they spelled their names; it's how the person hired to write the document or the parish official recording the event decided to spell it. So the same person can have two different spellings in two different documents, and they probably had no idea they were different. I have one case in which the person who drafted the document (a church officer) spelled Blood three different ways on the same page! By contrast, all the early Bloods of the MBC were able to sign their names, and they exclusively used the spelling 'Blood.'

Answer 1

Ruddington is 6 miles south East of Nottingham, close to the parish of Cotgrave which is 5 miles south of Nottingham.

Following a search for Blood/Bloud, Cotgrave holds three baptism records between 1620 & 1650 that may be of interest

1631  John Bloud

1635 William Blood

1638 John Blood

A Hanna Bloud is noted in Nottingham itself, in 1650

Four marriages are revealed between 1624-1640 mainly, for Nottingham, three have the surname Bloud, the other Blood.

Comments

So it appears that there's a slight preference for Bloud over Blood, but not much. Shall we flip a coin?

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P.S. Thanks.

Answer 2

Ruddington is a town in Nottinghamshire and between 1500-1650 AD, I found both spellings, Blood and Bloud in Nottinghamshire. There were more with the Blood spelling but at least two with the Bloud spelling, per familysearch.org .

Comments

Thanks, Frank.