Bowden Family History
- Bowden Name Meaning
- English: habitational name from any of several places called Bowden or Bowdon. Bowden in Devon and Derbyshire and Bowdon in Cheshire are named with Old English boga ‘bow’ + dun ‘hill’, i.e. ‘hill shaped like a bow’; one in Leicestershire (Bugedone in Domesday Book) comes, according to Ekwall, from the Old English personal name Buga (masculine) or Bucge (feminine) + dun. There are also Scottish places of this name, but there are comparatively few bearers of the surname Bowden north of the border. In England the surname is found most frequently in Lancashire and in the West Country. In Devon and Cornwall there has been some confusion with the Norman personal name Baldwin. English: habitational name from Bovingdon, Hertfordshire, so named with the Old English phrase bufan dune ‘on, upon the hill’. The surname may also have arisen as a topographic name from the same phrase used independently, for someone who lived at the top of a hill. Irish: Anglicized form of Gaelic Ó Buadáin ‘descendant of Buadán’, an Old Irish personal name.
Source: Dictionary of American Family Names ©2013, Oxford University Press
- 1,266,304 Historical Documents with Bowden on Ancestry
- 445,283 Birth, Marriage, and Deaths
- 289,556 Census and Voter Lists
- 37,818 Military Records
- 27,178 Immigration Records
- 466,469 Member Trees
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Number of Bowden families
 817 - 1,632  273 - 816 |
 1 - 272  |
from the 1891 England and Wales Census Data
Number of Bowden families
|
13 - 23 5 - 12 |
1 - 4 |
from the 1851 Canada Census Data
Bowden census records
You can see how Bowden families moved over time by selecting different Census years.
Census records can tell you little-known facts about your ancestors such as birthplace, occupation and value of personal estate.
from the New York Passengers List
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The information for this chart came from the U.S. Immigration Collection at Ancestry. You can find out where the majority of the Bowden families were living before they immigrated to the U.S and learn where to focus your search for foreign records.
Immigration records can tell you an ancestor's name, ship name, port of departure, port of arrival, and destination.
from the Canadian Passenger Lists
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You can find out when most of the Bowden families immigrated to Canada. You can focus your search to immigration records dating from that era.
Immigration records can tell you an ancestor's name, ship name, port of departure, port of arrival and destination.
from 1881 CA Census Data
Bowden census records
Census records can offer a lot of little known facts about your Bowden ancestors, such as occupation.
Occupation can tell you about your ancestors' social status and economic status.
Did the Bowdens fight in a war? Military records can tell you a lot
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