A Boston lawyer’s collection of remarkable surnames, and where they came from

Nathaniel Ingersoll Bowditch, a Boston lawyer and antiquarian and the son of the navigator Nathaniel Bowditch, collected surnames that struck him as remarkable. In Suffolk Surnames he sets them out with what he could find about each: where the name came from, the joke it invites, the local history behind it.

This second edition, enlarged, came out from Ticknor and Fields in Boston in 1858, printed by John Wilson and Son. For a reader now it is a gathering of odd and telling names to dip into, and a resource for anyone working on Massachusetts families and their histories.

This copy was the author’s gift, in August 1858, to James Spear Loring, for many years a Boston bookseller and a writer of history, associated with the New England Historic Genealogical Society. It is in the original purple-brown ribbed cloth with the arms in gilt; the spine is much faded and worn, the corners frayed, the inner hinges cracked and the sewing loose, with leaves separating near the index at the back, and there is foxing in the text. It needs conservation if it is to be handled often.