Part 2: Origin of Haynie Name

Last night I looked up the Hanney location, linguistic root words in English place names, and finally another source for surname meanings: a free section of Ancestry.com.

 

Ancestry.com, which cites the Oxford Dictionary of American Surnames (or similar title), emphasizes the Irish origin with the old saint reference.  [When Christianity came to Ireland, it was combined with some of the Celtic goddesses and such.  Or maybe Eanna was a real woman in Christian times; I don't know.]  They implied that the bird connection was a mistake, because the Gaelic name Ian (ean) means bird...and somehow this was read into the O'Heaney or O'Heagney name...

 

However, I am charmed by the concrete geographic connections, as I was when I found the English village of Covington, which reportedly was where our Covington immigrant ancestor actually came from.

 

One thing that L.H. Rossman didn't find, apparently, was the town that Captain John Haynie came from.  He was a Royal Navy officer at the time, not just a sea captain as I wrote in another blog entry. 

 

If the name Haynie in fact had any connection whatsoever with the villages of West Hanney & East Hanney, then we can be sure that the "-ie" sound means island (-ey, -ay).  The Wikipedia entry says that these two little towns are in a low marshy area and used to be islands in the marsh!  Formerly part of Berkshire, they now belong to Oxfordshire.  They have a website:  www.thehanneys.org.uk