Origin of the Name Bodie
The origin of the name
Bodie was found in the allfamilycrests.com archives.
Over the centuries Surnames developed a wide number of variants. Different spellings of the same name can be traced back to an original root. Additionally when a bearer of a name emigrated it was not uncommon that their original name would be incorrectly transcribed in the record books at their new location. Surnames were also often altered over the years based on how they sounded phonetically and depending on the prevailing political conditions it may have been advantageous to change a name from one language to another.
Variants of the name Bodie include Boddy, Body, Bodd and Bode. This is baptismal name meaning 'the son of Baldwin'. This surname is common in the Aberdeen Poll Book of 1696. It is also a Norfolk surname and appears in Cambridgeshire, Hunts, and Oxfordshire. This name is found in many mediaeval manuscripts in Scotland and examples of such are Mr. Gilbert Bodie who was a member of the General Assembly which met at Dundee in 1597. A James Body was heir by conquest of Master Gilbert Bodye, Minister of the Church of Holme in Orkney, in the vill and lands of Cragquhorthie in the parish of Kinkell, Aberdeenshire in 1608.
In Ireland this name and its variants were introduced into Ulster Province by settlers who arrived from England and Scotland, especially during the seventeenth century. It was the 'Plantations of Ireland' in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that marked the end of Gaelic supremacy in Ireland. While the influx of settlers in the wake of the earlier Anglo-Norman invasion of the twelfth century resulted in a full integration into Irish society of the new arrivals, the same never occurred with the Ulster Planters who maintained their own distinct identity.
The Bodie coat of arms came into existence centuries ago. The process of creating coats of arms (also often called family crests) began in the eleventh century although a form of Proto-Heraldry may have existed in some countries prior to this. The new art of Heraldry made it possible for families and even individual family members to have their very own coat of arms, including all Bodie descendants.