The bow Surname

bow Name Meaning and History

English: metonymic occupational name for a maker or seller of bows, from Middle English bow (Old English boga, from bugan ‘to bend’). Before the invention of gunpowder, the bow was an important long-range weapon for shooting game as well as in warfare. Boga is also found as a personal name in Old English, and it is possible that this survived into Middle English and so may lie behind the surname in some instances. In other cases (for example, Richard atte Bowe, 1306), the name is topographic, from the same word in the transferred sense ‘arched bridge’, ‘river bend’, an allusion to their similarity in shape to a drawn bow.
Irish: Anglicized form of Gaelic Ó Buadhaigh (see Bogue).

Dictionary of American Family Names, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-508137-4

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bow Family Facts

Distribution of bow Families in the US in 1920

Number of bow families

30-58

11-29

1-10

Compiled by Ancestry.com.au from the 1920 US Federal Census records

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Year

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The information for this map came from Ancestry.com.au’s US Federal Census Collection.

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Threads: 30 - Messages: 143

Thread	Author	Replies
Warren E. Bow - Michigan	kbrownst	0
Jesse Robinson Bow	ShannonBow	0
Wm. H. Bow / Nancy Cole-KY	rhondam123	1
Bows of Kilsyth, SCT to Aus Canada	John Donaldson	4
Bow/Laverty	cwcrumpacker	1
Bow Family	Melody Bow	6
Margaret Bow	Craig	3
Bow relations...	Sierro2	0
Bow relations...	Sierro2	0
bow	ann_clancy	1

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