Geary

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Geary family page

Ivy Grace Geary

Record Search

Direct links to lists of baptisms, marriages and burials for the Geary family can be found under Family Records opposite. If you want to search for records for a spelling variant of Geary, or for any other family name, just click below on the first letter of the family name you are interested in. This will open a new tab in your browser giving you a list of family names beginning with that letter, for which there are baptism records in our database of half a million church and public registry records.

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New records

From August 2020 we have started adding records from non-Anglican churches, and this process will continue as more records, held by Jersey Archive, are digitised and indexed. Our database now includes buttons enabling a search within registers of Roman Catholic, Methodist and other non-conformist churches. These records will automatically appear within the results of any search made from this page.

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Origins of surname

The Guerrier family who lived in Grouville in the 1840s and '50s changed their name to Geary. The family came from France via Alderney and, because we were not aware of any confirmed instances of an immigrant surname being anglicised in Jersey in the 19th century (it happened frequently with Jerseymen who emigrated to the USA and elsewhere) we could not understand how the spelling Geary arose.

We have now been informed by a member of the Geary family, still present in Jersey today, that there is a simple explanation. The Guerriers were seafarers and sailed all over the world. In or about the 1860s, the men who had previously been listed as Guerrier began to be recorded as Geary in the Seaman Benefit Register which had to be completed for each voyage. The person recording the surnames wrote them down as he thought they should be spelt and the change was perpetuated in subsequent church and census records

Guerrier, from the French guerre = war, referred to a soldier. Geary, an English name, is said to have a variety of possible derivations, one of which is a soldier who carried a spear - old-German geri.