Irish "Bearden" origins?

Question

How would I go about finding the meaning of this name from a reliable source?

Answer 1

Ancestry.com or rootsweb.  Good Luck!

http://www.familyhistory.com/surnames.as...

Answer 2

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.ht...

Answer 3

www.familysearch.org is the LDS church website. What makes much of their info reliable, are the entries in what is called the IGI (International genealogical index), those that are taken directly from original sources, such as parish registers. I did a fast scan of their listings, and the majority of entries that I see, are those in the early 1600s in England.  From my experience, I would ask if you have any documentation that your Bearden/ Beardon ancestors were actually from Ireland. A variation in spelling is normal, and will not always affect the origin.

What OFTEN happens.. is that the origin of a name is by family tradition, and not actual research. One example in my own research is the long standing belief that Fullingim was an Irish name, since it was known there was Irish in the family. None had ever found the name at all, prior to 1850. When legitimate records WERE found.. it was absolutely determined that the ONE man's name was originally Fillingham.. which is a village in Lincolnshire, England. The right name was traced to the ancestor. It was not wrong that this family had Irish background, however it came from the WIFE, whose maiden name was not Fillingham.

To back this up... ancestry.com offers this, and from a GOOD source-

bearden Name Meaning and History

Possibly an English habitational name, a variant of Barden, or from places in Devon and Cornwall called Beardon, from Old English burh ‘manor’ + dun ‘hill’. In the British Isles the surname is now rare occurring chiefly in Kent.

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

There are sadly a number of sites online that sell family histories and family crests, which most reputable genealogical sources show or believe to be very shaky, to say the least.  I strongly recommend that you don't use these sites (you'll recognize them by coffee mugs/ keychains for sale).

My advice is to check into if anyone has actually researched the exact ancestors of the Bearden name, and confirmed where they came from. Even if they were in Ireland at one time, the probability is that they had English ancestry.