The Ockerby Website
 OckerbyOckerby must be one of the rarest surnames in the world. In a recent survey conducted by Burke's Peerage only 154 families with the surname Ockerby were found in the whole world! Ockerby is how the surname is currently written. Research into our ancestry has shown that at different times over the centuries our surname has been variously spelt as Occarby, Ocerby and Okarbie, as in the case of our oldest know ancestor, Ricardi Okarbie. In this site you will find a family tree of our ancestors dating right back to 1575. We cannot verify that this is the true line as there is some discrepancy regarding the exact lineage as records were lost during Henry VIII's Reformation which ransacked the monastries, places where records of births, deaths and marriages were kept. However, we are certain of the true lineage all the way back to John Ockerby, born in 1724 who married Hannah Wilkinson in 8th November 1753 and subsequently fathered 6 children giving us the line of descendants we have today. This work has been a long time in the making. My father, Frank Ockerby, became interested in the subject when he was contacted many years ago by Dorothy and Mildred Clarke whose mother was an Ockerby and who found an entry under Ockerby in a Sheffield telephone directory back in the 1960s. The story unravelled slowly as research in those days was painfully slow involving visits to various libraries, requests for copies of births and deaths certificates from various institutues and lengthy correspondence with Parish vicars in the various villages of North Yorkshire. After the respective deaths of Dorothy and Mildred the file lay dormant for many years until the opportunity arose to commission the report by Burke's Peerage. In more modern times, it was an easy task to send a form letter to every address listed in the Burke's Peerage report and this resulted in responses from various corners of the globe and the rekindling of the quest for validation of our ancestry. Most notable of the responses was one directing us to Kathy Wright in Melbourne, Australia, whose mother was an Ockerby and who had coincidentally been working on the history of the Australian Ockerby descendants. Kathy turned out to be a most formidable researcher and managed to make contact with most of the Australian "rellies" as well as working her "line" back through Featherstone Ockerby who emigrated to Tasmania with his (eventually) eleven children in 1883, and also discovered and / or was able to confirm other earlier dates and connections. In 2004, Kathy finally published her work on Featherstone and the subsequent Australian Ockerbys in a delightful and most readable book entitled Tasmanian Pioneers. Whilst research may now be easier with the internet, email and IGR records, it is still a huge, time-consuming and pains-taking activity and Kathy's efforts and devotion to the task should be warmly applauded. To look at the Ockerby Family Tree click here
Steve Ockerby |
What's in a Name? Many surnames are derived from the place where a person lived (Pickering, Halifax, Windsor) or that person's profession (Cooper, Taylor, Smith, Fletcher). In the case of Ockerby, it is likely to be the former. There is a small hamlet known as Fockerby in north Lincolnshire. It is likely that there was once a John of Fockerby which through common usage became John of Ockerby, then John Ockerby. |
