The Day Family

    Spanning more than 1200 years, more than 47 generations of the Day family are identified herein, including more than 28 in Wales from about 400 to about 1400, 5 in England to 1604 and 13 in this country to date. Of necessity the listing is patrilineal as that is the way records have been kept, with wives merging their identities and backgrounds with those of their husbands due to their changes of name. For convenience there are here listed the names and years of birth and death of our direct paternal ancestors in this country:

     All of the family known personally to the writer are descendants of Stephen Brainerd Day and most are grandchildren, great-grandchildren or great-great-grandchildren of his son, Everett Wilbur Day.

Evolution of the Name "Day"

The          The Day Family, published by the American Genealogical Research Institute, states that the surname DAY comes from a now obsolete English word DEY (also spelled deye and daye) meaning "kneader of bread" and originally applied to a female servant. By the middle ages it denoted any household worker, male or female, who helped to prepare food, and later was applied to dairy workers throughout England. This history certainly does not apply to our name as during that entire period our direct ancestors were still residing in Wales and moving from the traditional Welsh surnames to DEE, which, after several generations and emigration from Wales to England, became DAY. George E. Day, in his 1846 Genealogical Register of Descendants in the Male Line of Robert Day states “Dee, signifying, it is said, dark or dingy , is the name of a small river in Wales and was probably applied to some ancestor of the family, dwelling upon its banks, in order to distinguish him from others --- and in time the word Dee came to be written, according to its apparent sound, Daye or Day. This name, moreover, still prevails in Wales, and is there pronounced as in England and in this country.”  We are told that the word DEE means “black” in Welsh and it should be noted that the DEE river forms part of the boundary between Wales and England and it was in the counties along this river that our early ancestors lived. (There are also two rivers of the same name in Scotland.)                            

     In any event, our family name had become DAY by the late 1400s and no subsequent deviation in spelling is known. The first immigrant, our progenitor Robert Day, came to this country in 1634. In 1790, 156 years later, the first census was taken and although some of the records were destroyed by the British in 1812, there remain records of over 200 heads of family named Day, with the majority residing in New England. Exactly 100 men named Day are listed as serving in the Revolutionary War, including our direct ancestor Asa. By 1964 DAY was the 229th most frequently occurring surname in the United States but by 1974 had dropped to 240th. There were approximately 98,500 adult Americans named Day at that time.

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