2.6 The name Winner

How my father would have loved the Winner surname discussion list, WINNER-L! He was for a while in the ’70s and ’80 obsessed with his family genealogy. I was young and a little embarrassed by some of the things he said about his illustrious ancestors, so I never paid it any real mind, but now it occurs to me that someone out there might find some of what I remember about it interesting.

My serious disclaimer though is that I was young when he told me most of this and may not have clearly understood all of it, and it’s been years and I have absolutely no idea how he arrived at his conclusions other than he spent many hundreds of hours pouring over obscure documents copied from far away places. That’s all I know. So this is all just "he said" stuff. Not anything I personally know (or even particularly believe) to be true.

So, first, he was convinced that there were two basic and unrelated derivations of the name Winner. The first, and more common in the states was German; an Anglicization of Wiener or Viener or something like that. The other, less common was an Anglicization of the welsh name Gwynedd (the ’dd’ pronounced like a hard ’th’)—the name of the northernmost province of Wales. I gather that this Anglicization happened in Britain, before our ancestors sailed for America, as a result of the falling fortunes of the Welsh people for the previous three of four hundred years. I guess it was easier to not have a really welsh-sounding name in Britain, and many seriously hard to pronounce welsh-sounding names are rare now and have been replaced with Saxon-derived names or modified versions of the originals. The Winners or a Winner came then with the early welsh settlements in Pennsylvania, and spread out since then. My father was born there, and much of his family lived there, at least for some time. He was convinced that he was decended by the male-male line from Owain Gwynedd, Prince of Wales. Gwynedd’s arms are above.

My father’s name was Evans Hawthorne Winner Jr. His father, my grandfather, of course, was "Hawthorne" Winner, his grandfather was Joseph Eastburn Winner Jr. (composer of Little Brown Jug fame—my only claim to family fame, and brother of the far more prolific composer of mid-19th century popular tunes, Septimus Winner). He was the son of Joseph Eastburn Winner, son of Joseph Winner jr., son of Joseph Winner, son (I think) of one James Winner.

At any rate, Evans (my father) worked up enormous genealogical charts. I don’t know why, but he seemed quite convinced that James Winner’s patrilinear line went back to Owen Gwynedd and the old kings of Gwynedd. For all I know it could be true, but again, I have no idea. It did provide the advantage of being able to then use the old Celtic king lists to continue the charts, which was no-doubt lots of fun.

In any case, if any of this is useful it might be the possibility of linking Winner to the old welsh name Gwynedd or other Anglicizations like Wynner or Wynneth, which someone might find interesting.

2005.1.21
Based on a post to WINNER-L