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The moss Surname

moss Name Meaning and History

  1. English and Welsh: from the personal name Moss, a Middle English vernacular form of the Biblical name Moses.
  2. English and Scottish: topographic name for someone who lived by a peat bog, Middle English, Old English mos, or a habitational name from a place named with this word. (It was not until later that the vocabulary word came to denote the class of plants characteristic of a peat-bog habitat, under the influence of the related Old Norse word mosi.)
  3. Americanized form of Moses or some other like-sounding Jewish surname.
  4. Irish (Ulster): part translation of Gaelic Ó Maolmhóna ‘descendant of Maolmhóna’, a personal name composed of the elements maol ‘servant’, ‘tonsured one’, ‘devotee’ + a second element which was assumed to be móin (genitive móna) ‘moorland’, ‘peat bog’.

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

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Distribution of moss Families in the US in 1920
Number of moss families
 293-584
 98-292
 1-97
 0
Compiled by Ancestry.com from the 1920 US Federal Census records

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The information for this map came from Ancestry.com’s US Federal Census Collection.
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The moss name in History

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