Project Goals
Determine reliability of various oral traditions versus the actual paper trails.
Determine relatedness among Ozment lines.
Determine relatedness to other spellings: Osman, Osmeña, Osment, Osmond, Osmund, Ozement, Ozman, Ozment, Ozmint, Ozmon, Ozmon, Ozmund, Asmentz, Asmundi, Ausment, etc.
To determine ultimate origins, and find relatives in the U.S. and abroad.
Os + man (god + man) in Saxon, and
As + mundr (god + protection) in Norman
are cognate.
It was As + mund in Danish and Swedish.
A "mundr" can also mean the price a husband
paid in Viking times to his father-in-law for
a good wife.
The Maryland line is likely from the West Saxons,
being from Wessex (Kingsclere in Hampshire).
The Danish Jutes [of Kent (adjacent London) and the Isle of Wight] were among the Frisian, Angle, Saxon, and Jute settlers in England circa 450.
The name as a first name was present in England
both before and after the Battle of Hastings in 1066.
Several Osmund were in the 1086 Domesday Book,
some with stated ties to Normandy and Anjou in France.
Of course, the overlayment of a given name, then as now, doesn't necessarily betoken ethnicity. The individual might be a Celtic Briton with a Saxon name, for example.
The 1881 census of England shows the
name's distribution primarily in southern
England (Saxon or Jute?) and
below the Danelaw of the Angles.
The Norwegian area was NW of here, too
(Lancashire, etc.).
1881 British Census
shows the following distribution of its 137 OSMENT families--
Middlesex (incl. London): 41
Dorsetshire: 27
Hampshire: 25
Somerset: 16
Devonshire: 9
Surrey: 8
Jersey, Channel Islands: 6
Kent: 3
Lancashire: 1
Glamorgan, Wales: 1
Osman and Osmond were a bit more widely spread.
I've had e-mail contact with a Middlesex
(northern London) Osment from Stoke Newington,
with ancient roots in Osmington, Dorset, and,
previously, the Channel Islands at the time of the Norman Conquest.