HYMAS

The surname Hymas is an English family name that derives from medieval personal names and, possibly, a now lost place in the North of England.

It is normally interpreted as meaning son of Hym or descendant of Hym, where Hym or Hymme was a diminutive form of the given name Hamon. The name Hamon itself is rooted in the Germanic personal name Haimo, which translates to home or house. Consequently the surname can be read as a patronymic bearing the sense ‘of the house man’ or ‘descendant of the homemaker’.

In addition, there are documentary references that link the spelling variations Himus, Hymus, and Hymas to the older locational surnames Henmarsh, Hindmarsh and Hindmarch. These names appear to be derived from the pre‑seventeenth‑century place‐name Hindmarsh, which itself comes from the Old English elements *hind* ‘female deer’ and *mersc* ‘marsh or fen’, giving the meaning ‘the marsh frequented by deer’. Scholars believe that the surname was initially associated with a medieval village in the county of Durham that has since vanished from contemporary maps. Such disappearances were common, and a range of causes—changes in agricultural practices to make way for sheep pastures, the impact of the plague between 1348 and 1665, land drainage, war, coastal erosion and the processes of urbanisation—are generally accepted explanations.

Church registers provide the earliest attestations of the surname in its modern form. On 28th July 1577 the marriage of Jenet Hyndmas and Roger Preston was recorded at St. Nicholas, Newcastle‑upon‑Tyne. The christening of Anthony Hymas on 7th August 1658 was entered in the register of All Saints, Newcastle‑upon‑Tyne. A later marriage in the third month of 1684 between Robert Hymas and Katherine Blockley is listed for Allhallows, London Wall, city of London.

In the centuries following the eighteenth, the name persisted mainly in the North‑East of England, where the earliest documents were found. By the nineteenth century, census records show a small number of bearers of the surname living in County Durham, Northumberland, and Newcastle‑upon‑Tyne, reflecting a continued, though limited, concentration in the region where the original place name once stood.

Over the centuries the spelling has fluctuated between the variants Hymas, Hymus, Himus and the earlier forms Henmarsh, Hindmarsh and Hindmarch. The modern spelling Hymas is the one most commonly encountered in contemporary civil registrations and genealogical records.

Typical given names associated with the Hymas surname

Male

• Andrew
• David
• Gary
• James
• John
• Michael
• Paul
• Peter
• Richard
• Robert
• Scott

Female

• Clare
• Emma
• Jane
• Janice
• Jennifer
• Katy
• Margaret
• Nicola
• Patricia
• Sarah
• Susan
• Vanessa

Similar and related surnames

Related and similar names are generated algorithmically based on the spelling, and may not necessarily share an etymology.

How to communicate the surname Hymas in...

Braille

⠓⠽⠍⠁⠎

Morse

....-.----.-...

Semaphore

Origin: English

Region of origin: British Isles

Country of origin: England

Religion of origin: Christian

Language of origin: English

Famous people named Hymas

• Tony Hymas - Musician

Names and descriptions courtesy of Wikipedia, and may contain errors. This is not intended to be an exhaustive list of every famous person with this name.

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