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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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The moss name in History

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

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

Click on a state to view moss census records

Year

How is this helpful?

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

What do I do next?

The information for this map came from Ancestry.com’s US Federal Census Collection.
  • Census records can tell you little-known facts about your ancestors such as birthplace, residence and occupation.
  • Click here to search moss census records.

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