Talk:Yarborough

Danish origin

The text that keeps being inserted is a non-sequitur. If the surname derived from Yarburgh in Lincolnshire, then it is not from Denmark, since Lincolnshire is in England. The fact that Lincolnshire is part of what was the Danelaw does not mean that all of the people there were Danish, nor, in particular, that the owners and residents of this specific place were Danish at the time the surname was adopted. THe tales of English families tracing back before the Norman Conquest are almost all false, and someone named Eustacius was probably a Norman, not a Viking, but there is no evidence he would have held the property before the 1080s. It is a common misconception that all people of the same surname are probably related, and that is a claim that would require significant sourcing, particularly given the number of African-Americans on the list. In short, there is nothing in this paragraph that is verifiable. Agricolae (talk) 16:43, 1 December 2019 (UTC)

It’s my surname and yes we were Scandinavian I have a book on our family history, we were Vikings so unless it’s your surname then what you say is false. Eoroburg is the original spelling the English changed it to Yerberg then Yarburgh then Yarborough and yes we are Anglo-Saxons. England was almost 50% Germanic and I am 46 years old not some adolescent making up nonsense Fsufan4life (talk) 23:18, 1 December 2019 (UTC)

Your surname or my surname have nothing to do with true and false. As Wikipedia editors, we don't get to claim a greater ownership of a page because of an accident of our births. It is a toponymic surname, a surname derived from a place. Full stop. The fact that the place happens to be in an area where there was significant Danish settlement doesn't make the people with the surname Danish. Even were the original placename Danish (we say in the article it is Anglo-Saxon), it wouldn't make the families that took their name from that place several centuries later Danish. As to the claim that they are Anglo-Saxon (which is mutually exclusive with them being Danish), what would be the evidence for that? Outside of nobility toponymic surnames were not used in England until centuries after the Conquest, at which point 'Anglo-Saxon' was somewhat meaningless. If the early users were nobles, then they certainly weren't Anglo-Saxon. You yourself have tried to add unreferenced information saying it was owned at the Conquest by Eustacius de Yarborough. Setting aside the problems with that claim, were it true is would suggest this Yarborough was Norman, which is neither Danish nor Anglo-Saxon. Overall statistics about the population of England have nothing to do with it, nor your age. What you have been adding is internally-contradictory, and at odds with the way actual English toponymic surnames such as this arose. (And don't even try to tell me the member of Yarbrough and Peoples was a Dane, which is what you are saying by calling 'the Yarboroughs' Scandinavian.) Anyhow, the types of claims you are making require reliable sources, which you have failed to provide. Agricolae (talk) 00:33, 2 December 2019 (UTC)

because we are danish and the English decided to rename us after a given place like the Jewish took on German names but were still Jewish then wikipedia makes us English? That’s my point, and if I have African Americans as notable people as well what makes danish so different than you calling us English which is liberally false. Who’s to say I am not African American or my wife isn’t? Which she is....and her brother is Swedish but Jamaican Fsufan4life (talk) 16:47, 2 December 2019 (UTC)

Ethnic self-identification is indeed complex, which is another reason not to go there. Please note that I am not calling any 'us' English. I am calling the surname an English toponymic surname - that is, a surname that derives from an English place name, which is clearly the case but is ethnically neutral. As to claiming 'the English decided to rename us', that is not how it worked, at all. The Danes arrived primarily in the 9th and 10th centuries. At the time of the Norman Conquest they had intermarried and assimilated into the English realm, and none of them, Anglo-Saxons nor Danes, used surnames, just given names and sometimes patronymics. The same is true of many of the Normans and their companions, only the most prominent of which used toponymics. It was only after the Norman conquest that the first toponymic surnames appeared in England, and these were used by those who owned land after the Conquest, for the most part Normans, Flemish and Bretons that had received lands confiscated from the Anglo-Saxon or Danish natives. Some people with a given toponymic do indeed descend from these Anglo-Norman lords, but others do not: they were just the people who had been living there, and acquired the toponymic later on, as late as the 16th century, when they moved somewhere else. It was just a way for their neighbors (and the scribes recording taxes) to distinguishing multiple people of the same name, so he was not William Black or William Miller, he was the 'William from Yarburgh'. There was not some decision to force English names on Danes - there was no decision and no coercion, and it happened with Danes, Anglo-Saxons, Welsh, Cornish, Normans, Bretons, French, in short, everyone. Ethnicity cannot be assumed based on ethnic proportions of populations in England or in specific regions within England. It cannot even be assumed by a seemingly-explicit surname (I could show you a Henry the Irishman named because he had fought with the Normans in Ireland, not because he was of that ethnicity). The only way one can determine any lineage is Danish is to trace it, generation by generation, back to a specific person who was demonstrably Danish. It cannot be done with most families, like the Yarboroughs, for two reasons: the records that would make this possible don't exist (and never existed), and even if it could be done for one Yarborough, it would only reflect that one Yarborough's ethnicity, not the ethnicity of every Yarborough. Claiming specifically a Danish ethnicity for 'the Yarboroughs' is thus inaccurate, misplaced and unsupportable. Agricolae (talk) 19:27, 2 December 2019 (UTC)