Wickland

a bay and a grove

Welcome — you’ve found the Wicklands.

There isn’t much here yet, and that’s on purpose. For now this is simply a quiet place on the internet where our family name lives. Someday it may grow into more. While you’re here, though, there is one story worth telling: the story of the name itself, at least as well as we can tell it.

The Name

As best we can piece together, Wickland began as the Scandinavian surname Wicklund — in Sweden most often written Wiklund, and sometimes Viklund. It is a place-name, built from two old words for the landscape: vik, a bay or inlet, and lund, a grove of trees. A bay and a grove. The same pair shows up in Norwegian and Swedish farm and village names. Whether our particular line came out of Sweden or Norway we honestly can’t say for certain; the trail thins out somewhere in the crossing.

For most of history, families in Scandinavia didn’t keep a permanent last name at all. A son of Anders was Andersson. A daughter of Anders was Andersdotter. The name changed again with every generation. Townsfolk, clergy, and soldiers were the first to pin a name down. A soldier might be handed a short name so the regiment could tell the Anderssons apart. A family leaving a farm might take the farm with them in the name: a meadow, a ridge, a grove, a bay.

Through the 1800s — as people moved to towns, served in regiments, and boarded ships for America — more families settled on a fixed surname and reached for the countryside around them. Sweden’s first family-name ordinance came in 1901. It told people how to adopt a släktnamn, a hereditary name, and it protected names already in use. It did not wipe out patronymics overnight; those lasted in places into the 1960s. Norway wrote its own names act in 1923. A great many who became Wicklands in America had already left by then. They chose, or were given, a nature name the old way, without waiting for a law.

Somewhere on the way across the Atlantic, the spelling bent to fit English eyes. Wiklund and Wicklund were what the parish books had. Clerks and schoolteachers heard the k and wrote ck. They heard -lund and wrote -land, the English word they already knew. We can’t point to the exact ancestor who made the change, and we won’t swear to every detail of the story. However it happened, it stuck.

So, near as we can tell, Wickland means something like “bay grove.” We didn’t choose it — but it’s ours, and we’re glad you stopped by.

— The Wickland family

More here someday, maybe.