Stockton

Boy name variations

Family name origins & meanings

• English : habitational name from any of the places, for example in Cheshire, County Durham, Hertfordshire, Norfolk, Shropshire, Warwickshire, Wiltshire, Worcestershire, and North and West Yorkshire, so called from Old English stocc ‘tree trunk’ or stoc ‘dependent settlement’ + tūn ‘enclosure’, ‘settlement’. It is not possible to distinguish between the two first elements on the basis of early forms.
• A family of this name were established in America by an English Quaker, Richard Stockton, in 1656. He bought large tracts of land around Princeton, NJ, and founded an estate on which his great-grandson, Richard Stockton (1730–81), a leading colonial lawyer and one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, was born.