The History of ‘Yardley’
The name of ‘Yardley’ was used as a Family Name long before Family Names were used in the Isles of Britain. It is an ‘ancient’ name with ancient meaning. It is also not a common name as was always the case with telephone directories where very few, if any, Yardley’s could be found in the Y section! There are many famous people in history who carried this Family Name – and their inherent talents, skills and traits have followed through the generations to this day down the various Yardley family lines. There are also many geographical place names that carry ‘Yardley’ in the name as well as an entire parish in England. Such geographical place names have also spread to other parts of the world and are not just in the British Isles. As we unpick ‘ancient’ history we get to learn a lot more about ourselves, humankind, and how much of what is known as history is distorted, corrupted, incomplete as well as totally fabricated. It is exciting unpicking ancient knowledge and history. This page will explore the concept of our given and family names and some of the bare basics while the Media platforms will cover a lot more.
Introduction
Mankind has walked the lands of this world, sailed the seas and moved through the skies in one form or another since the beginning of time. In Ancient times we were not populated or lived in the same ways we do nowadays, and people mostly lived in the area where they were born of the land, or lived upon the land of their marital family, friends, for work or for other reasons. People, everyone, knew each other’s name, where they lived as well as their skills, talents or occupation, who they could go to for help, support and knowledge etc. And, in so ‘knowing’ each other, people looked out for each other, their property, their land, their possessions, their family members and their interests. People back then didn’t ‘turn a blind eye’ or not care because if they behaved like this then there would be shame upon them– but this is not the case in these current times. Communion and synchronisation with each other does not exist like in the days of old in the same way and to the same extent. The core reason for its almost total eradication is due to lands across the world being conquered, invaded and colonised by outsiders who have installed centralised slave and control systems upon mankind and in so doing ripped apart the very thread of natural human behaviour, socialisation and community.
Communities – which can also be called families, tribes, clans, peoples’ groups, villages, hamlets and so on – functioned as a well-oiled unit with everyone providing a unique and essential part of the whole. People mainly used only their given name and folks knew exactly who they were referring to, even if there were more than one individual with the same given name. People could easily identify which individual one was referring to by additional details pertaining to them, such as: son of, daughter of, their occupation or their geographical location, place of living etc. There was no need for ‘surnames’ to identify each other all of the time – this is a much later imposition onto mankind.
Given that mankind has language to express itself, communicate, describe, explain, ask, learn about all to do with their lives and their world so it goes that geographical identifiers hold an important part of the creating of surnames too, seeing as we are born of the land upon which we entered this world. In particular for those individuals and families who had owned and toiled the land upon which they lived and/or worked for centuries, millennia, will have created surnames that described their connection to the land and their ancestral heritage when it was imposed upon peoples to take a surname. Further, such ‘family’ names were also taken to other lands across the world to which those people named another geographical location with the ancestral surname attributed to the to land of their ancestry. The holder of the original surname, family name, naming the land of a new land they had migrated to, with their own name. However, the newly named place were named as the original was in ancient times, thus not ‘describing’ the geographical environment in the way the ancients did – but just naming a different stretch of land somewhere else, the same name, and somehow aiming to retain a slither of a connection to their own family’s ancient and ancestral past. Such examples include the Ancient family name of Yardley – which is found in America as a consequence of English settlers and migrants who held the Yardley surname. Much like the same way those who held a non-geographically related family name gave their name to another location in another land: Pennsylvania being one such.