Most members of this Project are Americans looking to expand their knowledge of family history in this country.  Published genealogies are good resources to begin construction of a lineage back to colonial days in this country or to a more recent date if your family arrived later, and Y-chromosome testing is a good tool to validate and expand our knowledge of these histories.  But once you have created the history back to the first colonial immigrant, neither traditional genealogical resources nor genetic testing is much use today in making a connection back to family in England at the time of colonial settlement. Traditional genealogical resources fail because the links provided are usually unsupported by documentation or have been contrary to verified alternative links.  Genetic testing has failed to date simply because the tests have yet to be as popular in the British Isles as they have here.  Over time, this will hopefully change, and one of the goals of this project is to encourage more testing in the British Isles with the hope of producing more matches for Fields in both places.

The word Field, in forms of its earliest spellings, has been around nearly as long as surnames have existed. If the legend of the early family is correct, De la Felde had a family context as early as the 6^th century in Alsace, a region of modern-day northern France that has also been under Germany rule from time to time.  That use of the name predates by several centuries the fashion of surnames being adopted by the ruling classes to designate prestige and dominion of place in Normandy, and predates by a few more generations the concept of heritable surnames passed from father to son.  It is difficult therefore to conceive whom exactly the Counts De la Felde of the Holy Roman Empire were, and how their entitlement related to family structure. Thus our present day perspective of a linked relationship between Y-chromosome inheritance and surname history may be out of touch with the original use of Field as a second name.

When the French-speaking Normans came to England in 1066, De la Felds came with them, but the word Feld would have already been familiar to the Anglo-Saxons who lost the Battle of Hastings, because the word was also a part of their language with a similar meaning for an area where the forest had been felled, making it suitable for agriculture. By the 13^th century, variations of the Field surname had begun to be passed from father to son among the high-born, and the published surname genealogies written centuries later were able to trace Field lineages back to progenitors such as Roger Del Feld (b. ~1240) of Rochdale, Lancashire, and Richard de la ffelde (~1160-a.1220) of Glynsurd, Ireland.  In England, the use of hereditary surnames first became popular among nobles, but for commoners, the practice did not become usual until later, with the initiation of the surname usage stimulated by the government’s desire in the 14^th century to tax a broader swath of the population during the Hundred Years War; you needed to be identifiable so that you could show that your tax had been paid.  At that time, the surnames chosen by commoners frequently signified the person’s occupation or geographic location, so Feld(e) and Feild(e) were sometimes used for this toponymic purpose.   It was also at this time that the “de la” prefix began to be dropped from use by the nobility, ostensibly to eliminate any memory of connections with the persistent, long-time enemy across the English Channel.  Thus the old surnames of the aristocracy began to look similar to the new surnames of commoners who were extending the surname custom.  By the end of the 16^th century when surnames were common throughout England, the name Field already had a long history of use in several contexts and as a hereditary surname had many origins. 

When North America became colonized in the 17^th century, the genomes of some Field families came too, but the high mortality associated with the early settlements complicated the association between genetics and family name. Field families came with the first waves of settlement to the shores of New England and Virginia. As a surname group, Fields are fortunate to have several published genealogies that have attempted to describe this settlement and the spread of family lineages across the country into the 20^th century.  Modern DNA analysis has confirmed some of the linkages, and proved others to be incorrect. 

Y-chromosome comparisons have also uncovered a few close matches of Field males with males of other surnames, and in some cases the common ancestors appear to date from the colonial era. Many of these surname miss-matches may be the legacy of the stark living conditions encountered by early settlers in both northern and southern colonies.  Probably the most commonly recognized example of these difficulties is the Pilgrim settlement at Plymouth, where more than half the company died during the first winter. Conditions in Jamestown were even worse, and for a much longer period of time.  Bernard Bailyn in The Barbarous Years, The Peopling of British North America, reports that by 1616, 2,000 people had arrived in Jamestown, but its population was only 351 survivors.  Most of the colony’s workforce came as indentured servants, recruited from orphanages, almshouses and prisons, and such people had scant knowledge of family history.  Later in the century, King Philips War in New England resulted in the deaths of over 2,000 New England colonists in 1675 and 1676, representing approximately 30% of the colonial population at that time.  Under these brutal circumstances, the reshuffling of surnames in colonial America is not a surprise, as people tried to establish new functioning family units by adoption and fostering.