Welcome to the Hodkinson History website

Mention has already been made that one of the evolutionary routes for the surname of Hodkinson was a direct development of Hodgkinson, which means that some Hodkinsons originally had a “g” in their surname. At the same time, there are cases where Hodkinsons, who never were Hodgkinsons, actually became Hodgkinsons.³

I have so far researched my family history back to around 1790 and there are a number of Hodkinsons recorded with a “g” in their names from that date to the start of the twentieth century. This is doubtless partly due to church officials and registrars misunderstanding certain dialects when recording births, marriages and deaths. It is also partly due to illiterate Hodkinsons being unable to check the spelling of their name when written down by others. Interesting enough, there are virtually no cases of Hodkinsons in my family history having their names misspelt when family members registering an event were literate. It is safe to say that since 1790 my family have been Hodkinsons, regardless of the "g" in some of the Hodkinson surnames. The years before 1790 have yet to be researched.

The UK census of 1841 shows that Lancashire and Cheshire had most recorded Hodkinsons – 610 and 225 respectively. The next highest numbers were to be found in Staffordshire (65), Derbyshire (61), Yorkshire (57) and London (22). Of course, with variants of the Hodkinson surname, not all Hodkinsons were properly accounted for. My 1841 ancestors are recorded as Hodgkinson and, therefore, do not feature in the above figures. At the same time, the figures include those who were incorrectly recorded as Hodkinsons. The data, whatever the shortcomings, are important, for they show clearly where Hodkinsons were concentrated in 1841. In 1911, Hodkinsons were still concentrated in Lancashire and Cheshire, but they were now also appearing in other parts of the UK where they previously did not have a presence.

As the nineteenth and twentieth century progressed, increasing numbers of Hodkinsons could be found in a small number of countries elsewhere in the world. This includes members of my family who emigrated to the United States of America in the nineteenth century.

To try and get the latest statistics regarding the distribution of the Hodkinson surname, I trawled through quite a number of surname websites but much of the information available is contradictory which means at least some of it is unreliable. One site (forebears.io) gives the number of Hodkinsons in the UK in 2014 as 3,530. Another site (britishsurnames.co.uk) says that 3,262 is the “current” total – but there is no reference date for “current”. The most accurate data is to be found in The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland (FaNBI), which, based on the 2011 census, gives the number of Hodkinsons in Great Britain (i.e. not including Northern Ireland) as 2,543. A separate figure in the FaNBI dictionary, based on a number of sources, gives the number of Hodkinsons in the whole of Ireland as 74. The 2011 population in Great Britain was 61.4 million – this means that there were about 41 Hodkinsons in every million people. Hodkinson certainly is not a common name, but, as mentioned in the FaNBI dictionary, it is common to have an uncommon surname.

As far as Hodkinsons living in other countries are concerned, the forebears site states that in 2014 there were 702 Hodkinsons in the USA, 451 in Australia, 149 in Canada and 87 in South Africa, with a number of other countries having 67 or less. The forebears site does say the statistics are in a developmental stage, but despite that, it is tempting to be unscientific, and add together the forebears worldwide 2014 figures for Hodkinsons (leaving aside any questions about accuracy), to the FaNBI 2011 figures for Britain and Ireland, all of which gives a total of 4,309 Hodkinsons in the world at a time when the world population was over 7,000,000,000.

Using what is often regarded as an outdated and ‘clumsy’ system of classification, Hodkinsons tend to be ‘working class’.  In the 1881 census, the most common occupations of Hodkinsons were coal miner, farmer (who could range from those who enjoyed a prosperous lifestyle to those who eked out a meagre living), cotton weaver, bricklayer, agricultural labourer, and housekeeper. When researching one of my ancestors born near Stockport in 1905, I looked up the occupations of Hodkinsons in the Stockport Directory of the same year⁴ and, although the information can hardly be regarded as a representative sample of all Hodkinsons living in Stockport at the time, it strongly indicates working-class backgrounds.  Twenty-four people are listed with the surname of Hodkinson, of whom 15 have occupations stated which are: bootmaker, charwoman, club collector, engine fitter, hatter, labourer (3), messenger, mill hand, moulder, railwayman, slasher, stoker, and watch maker. Moving on to 1939 and ancestry.co.uk provides lists of the most common Hodkinson occupations, which were, for males, general labourer, cotton weaver, railway clerk, and bricklayer; and, for females, cotton weaver, domestic servant, and unpaid domestic duties.

Nowadays, the growth of sophisticated methods of analysing increasing amounts of data relating to the lifestyles of individuals has led to different ways of classifying the population of the United Kingdom. Geodemographic systems, such as Acorn and Experian’s Mosaic, play a key role. One of Mosaic’s older categories (and no longer in use) had a lifestyle type with the label of ‘Coronation Street’, which it summarised as ‘poor, mostly white families, who own or privately rent, cheap terraced houses close to the centres of less prosperous provincial cities’.⁵ This is the group, according to Mosaic, which was more likely to include Hodkinsons.

What all the above does not mention, and there does not seem to be any relevant data, is the actual numbers, past and present, of Hodkinsons who had, or have middle-class backgrounds. At the same time, it has to be kept in mind that, from generation to generation, many Hodkinsons have been, and are, upwardly mobile – the status of the descendants of a 20^th century working-class Hodkinson may well be very different in the 21^st century. Then again, I have come across a Hodkinson family in my research who was moving quite nicely up the social scale whose fortunes underwent a dramatic reversal.

The websites mentioned in the text above have other strangely-assorted facts about the Hodkinson surname, such as the average height of Hodkinsons in some countries; average life span of Hodkinsons in the USA; average salaries in some countries; most common Hodkinson first names, and so on.