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The bold Surname

bold Name Meaning and History

  1. English: nickname from Middle English bold ‘courageous’, ‘daring’ (Old English b(e)ald, cognate with Old High German bald). In some cases it may derive from an Old English personal name (see Bald).
  2. English: topographic name for someone who lived or worked at the main house in a settlement, from Old English bold, the usual West Midland and northwestern form of Old English boðl, botl ‘dwelling house’, ‘hall’.
  3. English: habitational name for someone from Bold in Lancashire, which is named with Old English bold ‘dwelling’, as in 2 above.
  4. German: from the Germanic personal name Baldo, a short form of the various compound names with the element bald ‘bold’, notably Baldwin in the north, and Reinbold in the south.
  5. Swedish: probably of German origin.

Dictionary of American Family Names, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-508137-4
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The bold name in History

A unique volume of fascinating facts, statistics and commentary following the bold family name as far back in history as possible.

bold Family Facts

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Distribution of bold Families in the US in 1920
Number of bold families
 17-32
 6-16		 1-5
 0
Compiled by Ancestry.com from the 1920 US Federal Census records

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Year

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  • You can decide where (in which states) to start searching for bold records.
  • You can see how bold families moved over time by selecting different Census years.

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The information for this map came from Ancestry.com’s US Federal Census Collection.
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  • Click here to search bold census records.

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