Post by John Townsend"Roy Stockdill" wrote (snipped)
There is no simple answer to such a question. The explanations you will
find in the traditional, standard surname dictionaries are too simplistic.
However, for what it's worth, Patrick Hanks & Flavia Hodges in the Oxford
Dictionary of Surnames say that Golding is either.....
1) English, from the late Old English personal name Golding, a patronymic
from 'Golda' .
or.....
2) Jewish (Ashkernazic), a habitation name from Golding, the Yiddish name
of the town of Kuldiga in Latvia.
Does not one of the above two explanations seem rather more likely than the
other? Reaney, who devoted a lifetime's work to the study of British
surnames, also notes that the name is derived from the Old English "Golding"
and gives examples going back to the early 13th century. I would suggest,
therefore, that this is the derivation in most cases where the name has been
used in Britain.>
I tend to agree with you, John, though I think you will find that
Golding is also a Jewish name, like Gold and Goldman.
I too am an admirer of Reaney's work, but since becoming a fan of
George Redmonds' approach to surname origins I am beginning to look
at some of his definitions with a slightly more critical eye. George
has demonstrated to me several cases in which Reaney was patently
wrong. An example......
Reaney describes the surname SHACKLETON (which I have in my own
ancestry) as deriving from a place in North Yorkshire called
SCACKLETON. This is nonsense, since the surname is barely found at
all in North Yorkshire in records but is overwhelmingly a name of the
West Riding of Yorkshire, deriving from a hamlet called
Shackletonstall in the Calder Valley, above Hebden Bridge. It is very
probably a single-origin surname that ramified from the Calder Valley
into Keighley and Bradford, where it is common.
George Redmonds' objections - and I agree with him - to some of the
definitions in the standard surname dictionaries is that the writers
are deriving them only from the etymology and not by tracing them
back to the original holder in records (an exceedingly difficult task
in many cases, I grant you!).
Roy Stockdill
Web page of the Guild of One-Name Studies:- www.one-name.org
Newbies' Guide to Genealogy & Family History:- www.genuki.org.uk/gs/Newbie.html
"Familiarity breeds contempt - and children."
Mark Twain