8,906 Global HALES Family Members

HALES Family History

This interesting surname is of Anglo-Saxon origin, and is a topographical name for someone who lived in a nook or hollow, deriving from the Olde English pre 7th Century "halh" a nook, hollow, recess. In northern England the word often has a specialized meaning, denoting a piece of flat alluvial land by the side of a river, originally one deposited in a bend; in the south-east it seems often to have referred to a patch of dry land in a fen. In some cases the surname may be a locational name from any of the several places in England named with this archaic form...