When Lawrence Laughlin Weir was born on 2 June 1929, his father, Ralph Irving Weir, was 30 and his mother, Reta Althea Wilson, was 24. He died on 9 April 1995, at the age of 65.
Scottish and English: topographic name for someone who lived by a dam or weir on a river, from Middle English, Older Scots wer(e) ‘weir; fish-trap’. Compare Ware and Wear . In northern England and lowland Scotland there has been much confusion with the Irish and Scottish Gaelic names in 2, 4 and 5 below.
Scottish: in Scotland, this surname was sometimes used for Gaelic Mac an Mhaoir ‘son of the steward’, more often Anglicized as McNair .
Scottish (of Norman origin): surname of a family of Blackwood (Lanarkshire), which is said to be descended from Ralph de Ver, a Norman baron associated with William the Lion between 1174 and 1184. The change in pronunciation from Vere to Were would be unusual in Anglo-Norman French, and the true source of the surname may lie elsewhere. One possibility is Wierre in Pas-de-Calais. Another possibility is that the surname may represent versions of the Norman surname de la Were ‘of the war’, a nickname for a warrior; see Warr .
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