This page was primarily intended to deal with Buckner genealogy, though it strays a bit into famous Buckners and assorted Buckner-alia (or, as one of my friends commented, "the Buckner mystique"). Its purpose is mainly to collect and disseminate genealogical information collected by the numerous genealogists working on the various Buckner families, and I mean "Buckner families" in the most general way. It has, however, fallen behind the times considerably as web design has advanced since its 1995 inception.
Any contributions would be welcome. I can provide some storage space, though not a lot. I try to stick with older records which will be of more general interest.
In the United States, the vast majority of Buckners can trace their ancestry to one or more Buckners (the number is an uncertain and contentious issue) who immigrated from England in the 1600s. Some of these are the family treated rather imperfectly by Crozier's Buckners of Virginia. I usually refer to this line as
There were other colonial-era Buckner immigrations to the America though, in particular two from Ireland. I call one the
This latter Irish line may have had some connections to the West Indies, and indeed there are now substantial numbers of Bucknors in Jamaica particularly. Like the 17th century Irish Bucknors, the Jamaica branch preferred the "or" spelling, a feature which persists even today. The Jamaican Bucknors in turn seem to have given rise to some West African families, perhaps the descendants of Jamaican Maroons who were documented among a large population removed to Sierre Leone in 1800.
Broadly speaking, in the American Upper South, the McBuckners tended to follow Appalachian migration patterns while the Virginia Buckners tended to be more "Old South" type families, which certainly comes out in their respective Civil War leanings.
In addition, numerous, though generally fairly late instances are known of Germans with the name Buchner (less often Büchner) arriving in the US and changing their names to Buckner, whether by intention or accident. I don't have cute names for any of these lines yet. A very early example went Loyalist during the Revolution and many of them fled to Canada afterward, though these Canadian Loyalist families tended to settle on a "Boughner" spelling.
Finally, a second English line is known, which according to orthodox Buckner genealogies was founded by a Westphalian immigrant named Richard Buckner (b.ca. 1695) in Chichester, England. This line was particularly wealthy and well connected at one time, and consequently much ink has been shed over it. I call these
Queries See Buckner queries left by other people.
The query system itself has been gone for many a year.
The most basic and most often debated question about the origin of the name is whether the name was originally English or originally German. The answer is pretty simple - both. It is indeed found in England back to the very earliest history of surnames in the 13th century, and in my opinion, the vast majority of Buckners in the world derive from this English origin.
However, there are German-derived Buckners. The problem with the German derivation is that the German name spelled "Buckner" is so rare that it couldn't possibly account for all or even a significant number of the Buckners in England and America. There are two other similar German names though, Buchner and Büchner, which are much more common, about as common in Germany as Field or Archer is in the English speaking world. If you don't speak German, you might be thinking "well, those are all basically the same name." Problem is, they're not. I'm a Buckner who has lived in Germany, and trust me, to any German native speaker they're as different as "math" and "mess" (which sound virtually identical to many Germans) are to us. At this link, you'll find a sound file where I pronounce "Buchner", "Büchner", and "Buckner" with my best attempt at a typical 18th century German accent (the uvular [r] hadn't really penetrated Germany yet by that time).
What generally happened with German Buckners is that the name got misspelled or even entirely changed when the immigrants settled in English-speaking areas. My sense is that almost every instance was going from Buchner to Buckner, Büchner tended to get mangled to something else, "Beechner" or some such. Even when you see a record that says "Johann Buckner" arrived on a ship from Germany, you really don't know that Johann himself spelled it like that. It's pretty likely that he went on his way to Pennsylvania and called himself Buchner for the rest of his life, regardless of how the master of the ship he arrived on garbled the name. There's even a well known example of a German family of American Loyalists who were probably Buchners originally but alternated between Buckner and Boughner. After the Revolution, they fled to Canada where most of them finally settled on Boughner.
As for the English name, establishing where it comes from in England is pretty easy. Both historical documents and the statistics for the modern distribution of the name in England converge to the idea that it originated in Oxfordshire close to the border with Berkshire. Figuring out what it originally meant is harder. The earliest occurrences from the 1200s and 1300s have several typical features - they often have the prefix "de" (e.g. "de Bukenore"), end in "-ore" (not "-er", which seems to have developed in the mid 1500s), and had a middle unstressed syllable which probably disappeared in the 1400s, though there are no examples known yet for that period. The original pronunciation was probably something like "duh BUCKenOR".
Names with this "de" prefix were almost always place names. The original idea with them is that the place was where the person was from. Adam de Leigh was from Leigh, John de Stanton was from Stanton, and so on. At some point in the late 1200s or 1300s, these started to became fixed with the family, so that you would be called Hugh de Watley if your father had been a de Watley, even if you yourself were born, grew up, and lived somewhere totally different. The exact date of this transition is fuzzy and was probably different in different places for different people, but at any rate, we know for sure that Bukenore was a place. What we don't know is where this place was exactly. The very first known Bukenores in 1262 and 1316 lived in the village of South Leigh, so the name was probably well on its way to being hereditary already. In fact no de Buckenore has yet been found living in a place called Buckenore - most of them seem to have lived in or around South Leigh and Leigh (Oxfordshire). I still haven't been able to find a place with that name in any record in England, so its identity is still a bit of a mystery. The best clue I have so far is that a small creek off the Thames in that area was called "Bugganbroc" ("Buckenbrook" more or less) in Medieval times (now called Limb Brook - see G.B. Grundy, Saxon Oxfordshire, Oxfordshire Record Society (Series) v. 15, 1993, p.34). The suffix "-ore" was common in early English place names, and it usually indicated a rise or a river bank, so possibly "Buccanore" (to use the Old English rather than the Middle English spelling) was a small settlement or homestead on a bank or rise above this brook, a mere ten miles from the village of Cumnor which is familiar to many Buckner genealogists as the home of most of the known 16th century Buckners.
The most common spelling variations in my experience though arise from misreadings. Since many people aren't familiar with the name, when they can't make it out clearly in old manuscripts they often guess at things like "Backner" and "Buckney". Of course, "Backner" and "Buckney", are so rare in the United States that they don't occur in either my 1850 surname survey of 200,000 names or the U.S. Census 1990 survey. This puts their frequency in the one-in-a-million range at most, a thousand times or more rarer than "Buckner." (In fact, using US phone book data I was able to confirm this estimate of the frequency of "Buckney" - 11 listings in the US - compared to "Buckner" with about 11,000. "Backner" weighs in with 53 listings.) Therefore, oftentimes when you see either of these in American records, consider the possibility it's "Buckner" (or something else) misread. To complicate things, "Buchner" is also a common misreading of "Buckner", but it's also a real and relatively common German surname, so it's often hard to tell whether a name was really "Buchner" or just misread.
A quick phone book check of various countries will reveal that the name in the "Buckner" spelling is at least represented if not well represented in the population centers of most English-speaking countries, including Canada, the U.S., England, Jamaica, and Australia, but is quite rare if present at all in German-speaking ones. A check of the '92-'93 Berlin white pages revealed only two instances, whereas Toronto, London, New York, and Melbourne all at least doubled that figure. Buchners and Buechners were both numerous in Berlin.
In the United States, the surname Buckner was reported to be the 1225th most common surname in a 1964 analysis of Social Security data. A total of 22,825 people were estimated to bear the name at that time [Smith, p.316]. A more recent 1990 study by the Census Bureau places it at 991st, with 88,799 names, or 0.012% of the population. I can't really account for the apparent Buckner population burst of the last 25 years, but it may be due to a biasing of that particular 1990 study towards ethnic minorities. Since the surname has historically been most strongly concentrated in the U.S. South, it seems to enjoy a considerably higher frequency among the descendants of freed slaves, and this results in an exaggerated frequency estimate from samples which are strongly biased towards the African-American ethnic group. Other evidence from telephone listings suggests the number is probably nearer to 30,000. We can also note that in the IPUMS 1% samples of the 1850 and 1880 censuses, there were just 2 Buckners in around 200,000 individuals (~0.001%) and 46 Buckners in around 502,000 individuals (~0.0092%), respectively. The frequency increase between 1850 and 1880 is probably partly the result of the emancipation of the slaves and subsequent adoption of the surname in the 1860s. The extremely small sample size for 1850 results in a large sampling error as well.
From an online phone directory for the UK, I have estimated Buckner/Bucknor to have roughly a frequency there of about 1/110,000 (0.00091%), which equates to a total population of around 550. The CASA surname profiler agrees and even provides a distribution map. The fact that Buckner is far more common in the US arises mostly from a form of the "founder" effect which is observed in population genetics. Basically, because the name was established in America in the early to middle part of the 17th century when the total population was quite small, it got a sort of head start over many other names which were introduced later. "Buckney" for instance has virtually the same frequency in the US and UK, suggesting that it was introduced to America much later in history.
In Germany, the excellent Geogen system by Christoph Stoepel reveals that the modern frequency of "Buckner" in Germany is even lower, less than 1 in a million.
Note: "H. Anjou" seems to be in fact Gustav Anjou, a genealogist whose works are now widely considered to be of dubious accuracy, if not fraudulent. While this book does show some things that are considered to be typical of Gustav Anjou's works, such as its rather ambitious forays into medieval England, it generally does not make overly unsubstantiated claims about relationships between the earlier individuals and the later individuals, in my opinion. However, I only looked closely at the name history and medieval sections, so I do not know how accurate the later sections (where it overlaps with Crozier to a large degree) are. Crozier is known to have significant flaws in the trans-Atlantic area too, so both should be taken with a grain of salt, as they say. If it were my family tree - and it isn't - I would not accept anything in either Crozier or Anjou without corroboration from primary sources, though they can still be useful.
The Confederate general who surrendered Fort Donnelson to General Ulysses S. Grant, he went on to become Governor of Kentucky and famously mediated the Hatfield-McCoy feud.
Thanks to the wonders of technology, you can now actually see his grave on the web, courtesy of Find A Grave.
See Also: a wikipedia article
Following a military career as had his father, he rose to the rank of general in World War II and was killed at the battle of Okinawa. I'm told there is a plaque to his memory at the State (or really Commonwealth) Capitol of Kentucky in Frankfort.
See Also: a wikipedia article
Long-time major league baseball player for the Boston Red Sox.
See Also: a wikipedia article
Jazz pianist and organist.
See Also: a French wikipedia article, from which I extract:
With George Shearing, he was one of the creators of the "block chords" or "locked hands" technique for the piano. Legend has it that Milt Buckner developed the technique because his hands were too small.
Contemporary folk musician.
See Also: VH1 Article
Royal (UK) Navy officer who ultimately rose to the rank of Vice-Admiral of the Red (4th highest in the RN). Notably appears in Robert Louis Stevenson's Memoir of Feeming Jenkin and was the Admiralty's man on the scene during the 1797 Mutiny at the Nore.
See the UK National Portrait Gallery for a pic. Charles Buckner is also the progenitor of all known Chichester Buckners after the 2nd generation.
19th century portrait painter. I've recently confirmed that he was the grandson of Vice-Admiral Buckner, and thus a member of the Chichester line.
Contemporary musician. Jerry Buckner is probably best known as the coauthor of and performer on the 1982 novelty hit "Pac-Man Fever".
See also: Buckner & Garcia.Com.
See also: Buckner & Garcia Wikipedia article.
American science fiction writer. Winner of 2005 Phillip K. Dick award for best SF novel of the year.
See also: Wikipedia article.
See also: Official Web Site.
I'm Ben Buckner. If you have comments about this page or have something to be added, you can contact me at my Spambot-proof mail link (won't work if you're paranoid enough to have turned off your JavaScript.)