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Updated June 9, 2019

Family name origins & meanings

  • English : probably a habitational name from a place in Devon named Bowditch, from the Old English phrase būfan dīce ‘above the ditch’.
  • The surname Bowditch is well known in New England. Nathaniel Bowditch (1773–1838), author of The Practical Navigator (1772), a standard work that went through more than sixty editions, was born in Salem, MA, the son of a shipmaster. The family can be traced back, via a clothier who settled in New England in 1671, to Thorncombe in Devon in the early 16th century.

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