I have been trying to find the origin of a family name in Ireland.It is Hospital but I’m led to believe it originally was De Hospital any help would be appreciated. I was wondering if it is Spanish in origin and arrived in Ireland at the time of the Spanish armada,when some of the fleet was wrecked on the Irish coastline
I’ve never met anyone called Hospital. Or De Hospital
Thats a place where sick people go.
There is however, a place in Ireland called Hospital.
It has nothing to do with the Spanish Armada. See this column by Cecil:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/102/do-some-irish-names-come-from-spanish-armada-survivors
Very few of the survivors of the Spanish Armada ended up in Ireland. My guess is that Hospital is originally a French name. It’s probably a Norman French name that became an English name after the Norman Conquest in 1066. Thus, someone with the name Hospital in Ireland is probably a descendant of an English emigrant to Ireland who’s the descendant of a French emigrant to England.
The word “hospital” in Spanish used to be about anyplace which would take care of the infirm, the poor, the sick or the needy. That covers, among others, pilgrim’s hotels, hospices and orphanages. There’s several Spanish lastnames which mean “orphan,” a Hospital or Del Hospital could mean an ancestor who’s an orphan, or ancestors who were innkeepers.
Searching www.paginasblancas.es for Madrid (one of Spain’s most populous provinces, and one which has people from all over the country) and for the first lastname Del Hospital produces 17 people whose first lastname is Hospital (no Del).
I’ve encountered L’Hopital in French as well.
ETA: it might be of Portuguese origin too.
Notably, there is Guillaume de l’Hôpital, the originator of l’Hospital’s/l’Hôpital’s rule, which I dimly remember from math classes.
A quick google gets me this:
“This is a very unusual English surname. It may be recorded as Ashpital, Aspital, and Asptles, as well as Hospital, or these various recordings may may not be ‘related’ at all. The earliest recordings that we have found might suggest that the origination is the French surname Hospital, found in a wide variety of spellings including Hospital, Hospitel, Dhospital, L’Hopital, L’Hospitalier, and others. This was a name introduced into the British Isles by Huguenot protestant refugees fleeing persecution in mainland Europe from the late16th century. The earliest recording in church registers may be that of Robert Hospital, at St Martins in the Field, Westminster, on January 23rd 1628. The name means the keeper of a hostel or rest home, or is residential for somebody who lived at or by such a place. However it may also as Aspital etc be a development of the pre 7th century Olde English ‘aesc atte halh’ meaning the ash trees at the hall, or from ‘ash pitte halh’, the hall by the pit, except that we have not been able to identify any such place in the known gazetters. Finally it could be a variant of the surname Astle, from the village of Astle in Cheshire. The name means East Hill. The earliest recording we have is that of Samuel Ashpital, at St Leonards church, Shoreditch, in the city of London, on July 13th 1775.”
I was probably wrong then about it being a Norman French name. As An Gadaí writes, it’s probably a French Huguenot name. So it came to England from France in the sixteenth century, not the eleventh century as I guessed. I was just about to add the possibility that the ancestor of the person named Hospital was a member of the Knights Hospitaller:
Probably this isn’t the case though. The ancestor was probably just an innkeeper.
This has been mentioned to me by an old Aunt that the early connection to the family was from Huguenot background. I would like to thank you all for your valuable input