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The forbes Surname

forbes Name Meaning and History

  1. Scottish: habitational name from a place near Aberdeen, so named from Gaelic forba ‘field’, ‘district’ + the locative suffix -ais. The place name is pronounced in two syllables, with the stress on the second, and the surname until recently reflected this. Today, however, it is generally a monosyllable.
  2. Irish: reduced Anglicized form of Gaelic Mac Firbhisigh ‘son of Fearbhisigh’, a personal name composed of Celtic elements meaning ‘man’ + ‘prosperity’. A family of this name in Connacht was famous for its traditional historians, compilers of the Book of Lecan.

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

Distribution of forbes Families in the US in 1920
Number of forbes families
 217-432
 73-216		 1-72
 0
Compiled by Ancestry.com.au from the 1920 US Federal Census records

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