Luckes - Name

Recorded as Luckie, Lucky, Luckes and others, this is an English surname, but French and ultimately Greek in origin. The most likely origin is from the early medieval personal name "Lucas", a Latin form of the Greek "Loucas", given to a man from Lucania. This was a region in the south of Italy which translated as bright or shining. The personal name and later surname owed its popularity in the Middle Ages to St. Luke the Evangelist. Another possible origin is locational from the village of Luick, near Leige, in Belgium. The surname from the former source is first recorded in 1279, when William Lucke was mentioned in the Hundred Rolls of Cambridgeshire, while the surname from the latter source first appears in records in the late 13th Century (see below). Other very early recordings include those of Simon Luk in the Calendar of Inquisitiones Post Mortem for the county of Suffolk in 1286 and Thomas Lucke in the Subsidy Tax Rolls of Staffordshire in 1332. Robert Luckes married Mary Pall on August 19th 1638 at St. Margaret's, Westminster, London, while William Luckes married Jane Hall in London on February 27th, 1798. The first recorded spelling of the family name is shown to be that of Lucas de Luk, which was dated 1274, in the "Hundred Rolls of London", during the reign of King Edward 1st, known as "The Hammer of the Scots", 1272 - 1307. Surnames became necessary when governments introduced personal taxation. In England this was known as Poll Tax. Throughout the centuries, surnames in every country have continued to "develop" often leading to astonishing variants of the original spelling.