Side note
Geordie Bonafides
I am not Geordie by birth. I grew up in Florida. The nickname came from my mother, not from a postcode on the north bank of the Tyne. But the genealogy disagrees somewhat.
Source: 89,383-line Ancestry.com GEDCOM export — 1,486 individuals, 251 with British Isles origins.
The strongest case lives in the Strother family. They held land at Kirknewton — a village in the Till valley, about twelve miles west of Wooler, squarely in Northumberland — for at least six documented generations. Kirknewton sits near the Scottish border, in the hills where the dialect was already becoming Geordie.
| Name | Born | Place | Died |
|---|---|---|---|
| William Strother of Newton I | 1504 | Duddoe, Northumberland | — |
| William Strother #1 | 1530 | Kirknewton, Northumberland | 1612 |
| Sir Lancelot Strother | 1570 | Kirknewton, Northumberland | 1611 |
| William P. Strother III | 1597 | Kirknewton, Northumberland | 1669 |
| William Strother VI | 1630 | Kirknewton, Northumberland | 1702, Virginia |
Amber row marks the emigration point — William VI crossed to Virginia around 1646, the last Strother born in Northumberland.
From Virginia the family moved south over the following generations. By the mid-1800s, Elizabeth Strother — the Northumbrian bloodline now six generations removed from the Till valley — had married into the Everitt family in the American South. The Strother name carried forward as a middle name: the family's way of keeping the thread visible.
The Cleland line is Scottish — specifically from Garrionhaugh in Lanarkshire and Kilsyth in Stirlingshire, which puts them on the wrong side of the border for strict Geordie credentials. Alexander Cleland (1625, Kilsyth) died in Campsie. His son Sir James Cleland (1665, Garrionhaugh) arrived in Boston in 1715 and was buried in Edinburgh. The family eventually crossed to Connecticut and then New York.
The Scottish Borders and Northumberland have been culturally entangled since before either was clearly one country or the other. The Reivers — the raiding families who worked both sides of the border from roughly the 13th to the 17th century — left bloodlines that don't respect the modern political boundary. Lanarkshire to Northumberland is not a clean genetic distinction. But it is technically Scotland, so honesty requires marking it as such.
Everard — from which Everitt descends — is Old Germanic: eber (wild boar) + hard (strong, brave). The boar was an Old English symbol of warrior courage; it appeared on helmets and shields. Everard was a common name in Norman England, which is where it likely entered the family tree before spelling drift produced Everett, Everitt, and a dozen other variants.
So: Geordie Everitt — Northumbrian nickname, boar-strong surname, Florida upbringing. Two out of three is a reasonable claim.
Six generations of Strothers in Kirknewton, Northumberland (1504–1630), documented in parish records. Genuine Geordie country.
Clelands from Lanarkshire and Stirlingshire — culturally entangled with Northumberland through the Reiver era, but technically Scotland.
Old Germanic warrior etymology, Norman introduction, Northumbrian resonance. Morally satisfying but not a geographic credential.