Origins of surname
This name has three distinct origins.
- Occupational - a name for a steward or official from the Old French "baillis" or "bailif", and middle English "bail". The word survives in Scotland as "bailie", the title of a municipal magistrate, but in England has developed into "bailiff", an officer of the court.
- Topographical - denoting one who lived by the outermost wall of a castle or fortified town from the middle English "bail(l)y" as can be seen in the case of the Old Bailey in London which was part of the early medieval walls.
- Locational -from Bailey, in Lancashire which means "berry wood"
Early records
Bailey, a surname which arrived in Jersey from England, first makes an appearance in Jersey registers in the first decade of the 19th century. Edouard Bailey, a soldier, married Elizabeth Le Cras in St Brelade in 1806, and their daughter Elizabeth was baptised in St Helier the following year. One cannot help wondering if he was called Edward when he came to the island, but either changed the spelling or was simply recorded as Edouard to fit into the local community.
He was followed by a succession of soldiers and others from the south of England who married local girls and started families in the early part of the 19th century. By no means all of them remained in the island. Thomas Bailey, who married Elizabeth Pritchard in Mauritius a year after their first daughter was born there, came to the island in 1851 with his wife and two daughters. Another daughter and a son were born in Jersey in 1852 and 1854, but by 1857, when their last daughter was born, the family were back in the Midlands, from where they had originally come.
Variants
- Bailey
- Le Bailly, Le Bailiff, Le Bailif etc are not recognised as variants in Jersey. They are separate families with a much longer ancestry in the island
Family records
Family trees
- Descendants of John Bailey
- Descendants of William Bailey NEW
- Descendants of William Bailey -2, a different William Added 2018
Church records
- Bailey baptisms in Jersey
- Bailey marriages in Jersey (groom)
- Bailey marriages in Jersey (bride)
- Bailey burials in Jersey
Great War service
Occupation records
World War 2 casualties
Family wills
Burial records
Family album
Family businesses
Family gravestones
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Tips
The church record links above will open in a new tab in your browser and generate the most up-to-date list of each set of records from our database. These lists replace earlier Family page baptism lists, which were not regularly updated. They have the added advantage that they produce a chronological listing for the family name in all parishes, so you do not have to search through A-Z indexes, parish by parish.
We have included some important spelling variants on some family pages, but it may be worth searching for records for a different spelling variant. Think of searching for variants with or without a prefix, such as Le or De. To search for further variants, or for any other family name, just click on the appropriate link below for the first letter of the family name, and a new tab will open, giving you the option to choose baptism, marriage or burial records. You will then see a list of available names for that type of record and you can select any name from that list. That will display all records of the chosen type for that family name, and you can narrow the search by adding a given name, selecting a parish or setting start and end dates in the form you will see above. You can also change the family name, or search for a partial name if you are not certain of the spelling
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New records
Since August 2020 we have added several thousand new records from the registers of Roman Catholic, Methodist and other non-conformist churches. These will appear in date order within a general search of the records and are also individually searchable within the database search form
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