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The govan Surname

govan Name Meaning and History

  1. habitational name from Govan near Glasgow, first recorded c.1134 as Guven, possibly meaning ‘place of the smith’, although more recently a Cumbric word gir ‘hill’ has been suggested.
  2. from a reduced Anglicized form of Gaelic Mac a’Ghobhainn ‘son of the smith’, from gobha ‘smith’.

Dictionary of American Family Names, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-508137-4
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govan Family Facts

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Distribution of govan Families in the US in 1920
Number of govan families
 41-79
 14-40
 1-13
 0
Compiled by Ancestry.com from the 1920 US Federal Census records

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The govan name in History

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