This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list. Classification: Query Message Board URL: http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec/msg/an/iUI.2ACIB/1934.2 Message Board Post: Barbara quoted a passage which, I would stress, is not her writing, which says,"The arrival of William the Conqueror on the shores of England in 1066 had among its followers a family by the name of "le Chaundeler" which was later Anglicized to the present day Chandler. There were several by this name who settled in the early 1600's in Massachusetts, Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware................." This is literally true, but to me there seems to be an implication that all those "by this name" were related and of the "le Chaundeler" line. There's no reason I'm aware of to believe that. Chandler is an occupational surname which would have been taken by wholly unrelated people--insofar as any people are wholly unrelated--from different villages all over England just as names such as Cooper or Miller or Wheelwright or Smith or countless others were. This doesn't mean that the various Chandler families in this country are all unrelated, but the fact that they share a name doesn't mean that they are.

I would like to echo the wise words of Harlow Chandler - my opinion on the origin of the surname is that there is not one single source of the name. According to 'The Dictionary of Genealogy', surnames were first introduced into England by some of the leading followers of William the Conqueror, and were usually inherited by only the eldest son (along with the family property - this is why the poor - most people at that time - had no need for a surname, because they had no land to inherit). The first legal recognition of a hereditary surname was in the year 1267. By 1400, three-quarters of the population of England are reckoned to have borne hereditary surnames, and the process was complete by about 1450. So only a small number of Chandlers would have descended from a Norman named le Chaundeler. The ancestors of most Chandlers would have acquired their surname at least 200 years after the Norman conquest of England, and would have received that name because of their trade as a chandler or merchant. This naming - often by trade, sometimes by location, occasionally by appearance - would have happened village by village as Harlow says, but the subsequent distribution of the surname suggests that the term Chandler was used mainly in southern England. Some of the people acquiring the surname Chandler in this way would have been closely related to each other, but most would not. There were tallow and wax chandlers who made and sold various kinds of candles (an important trade in an age without electricity) and later there were corn chandlers and ships' chandlers. For quite a long time the term "chandler" was used simply to mean a grocer. Dick Chandler in Salmon Arm, British Columbia, Canada