Jones is a popular family name of possibly separate English and Welsh origins. Its English usage comes from the term son of John in a similar manner to Johnson. In Wales, where the name is proportionately much more common, it derives from a corruption of Ioan, Sion or Ieuan. It is one of the most popular surnames in the Welsh and English speaking worlds.
History
The Jones surname was first documented in 1279inHuntingdonshire, England.[1][2] Its popularity in Wales stems from the use of Ioan in the Welsh Authorised Version of the Bible. Ioan is used here for Ieuan, the Welsh form of John.[3]
In 1813-1841, there were about 85,000 people named Jones living in England (0.43% of the population) and about 145,000 people named Jones living in Wales (13.84% of the total population) [4][5][6] By 1881, migration to the urban centres of England had equalised the numbers so that both countries had a little over 163,000 people named Jones recorded in the census of that year.[7] Even so, it shows some areas of North Wales still had very high proportions of people carrying the name, for example in Sir Feirionnydd (Merionethshire) 23.6% and Sir Gaernarfon (Caernarfonshire) 22.3% were named Jones compared with 10.4% in Wales as a whole and 0.67% in England. Other, more readily identifiable Welsh names, such as Lloyd and Price (from ap Rhys), had greater proportions of their numbers living in England than Wales in 1881 - this may be because of the relatively higher concentrations of Jones in Welsh speaking areas.
It is likely that a number of Afro-Caribbean and African-American Joneses got their names from freed slaves adopting the names of the estate managers or owners.[8][9]
Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
According to the National Trust surname profilerJones is the second most numerous surname in the UK. There were 391,909 Joneses on the UK electoral register in 1998. This represents a rate of 10,521 Joneses per million Britons or just over 1% of the population. The proportion of Joneses in other Anglophone countries is slightly lower: the 2002 rate in Australia was 6,548 per million; Canada, 3,882 per million; and 2002 New Zealand, 5,499 per million. This name is much rarer in the Republic of Ireland with a rate of only 144 per million in 2003. National Trust information for the United States places the 1990 rate at 8,334 per million (0.83%) based on telephone directory records;[10] the 1990 United States census provides a frequency of 0.62%, providing an overall rank of 4th most frequent (following Williams and preceding Brown).[11]
^John Thornton, 'Central African Names and African-American Naming Patterns' - 'The William and Mary Quarterly', 3rd Series, 50, 4(October 1993): 728, 730, 733-739.
