When Pearlie Eileen Rutter was born on 6 April 1909, in Armidale, New South Wales, Australia, her father, John Rutter, was 35 and her mother, Mary Ann Gunnell, was 27. She died on 27 March 1997, in Waratah, New South Wales, Australia, at the age of 87.
English: occupational name from Old French roteor, roteeur, routeeur ‘player on the rote’, a musical instrument, a kind of harp or fiddle. The regular modern development of the name would have been to Roter (rhyming with boater), and to Router or Rowter (rhyming with doubter). These variants survive in small numbers, but the principal modern form is Rutter, found in fairly large numbers across England, especially in the northeast and in the West Midlands. The shortened vowel in Rutter may have been influenced by rotte, rutte, Middle English variants of Old French rote. Compare Root 2.
English: nickname from Middle English roter, rotour ‘robber, plunderer’, also ‘scoundrel, lecher’, a borrowing of Old French rotier, Anglo-Norman French routier ‘soldier of fortune; robber, highwayman, ruffian’, though this is a less likely source of the modern surname.
Dutch: nickname from Middle Dutch rut(t)er ‘freebooter, footpad’, cognate with 2 above.
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