When Edward B. Foss was born in 1866, his father, Harris Benjamin Foss, was 45 and his mother, Martha Berlin, was 41. He died in 1868, in Illinois, United States, at the age of 2.
English: either topographic name from Middle English foss ‘ditch’ (from Old English foss ‘ditch’, Latin fossa) or a habitational name from one or more of the many places so named, such as Voss in Plympton Saint Mary and Great Fossend in Burlescombe (both Devon), the River Foss (North Yorkshire), Foss Beck (East Yorkshire), and the Fosse Way, a Roman road running between Lincoln (Lincolnshire) and Axminster (Devon) via Leicester (Leicestershire), Cirencester (Gloucestershire), and Bath (Somerset), named in the Old English period from the ditch that ran alongside it.
Danish: from fos, vos ‘fox’, applied as a nickname for a sly or cunning person, or as a topographic or habitational name referring to a house distinguished by the sign of a fox.
Norwegian: habitational name from a farmstead so named from Old Norse fors ‘waterfall’, examples of which are found throughout Norway.
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