Origin of the Name Pollock
The ancient history of the name
Pollock 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 Pollock
include Pollox, Pogue, Poke and Polock. This is a name of local or territorial origin, from the lands of Pollock in Renfrewshire, meaning 'of Pollock'. This name is of Scottish descent and is found in many ancient manuscripts in the above country. Examples of such are a Peter de Polloc, who gifted the church of Polloc to the monastery of Paisley, 1177-99, and Thomas de Polloc who was a witness to a document concerning the land of Cnoc in Renfrewshire, recorded in 1234. Names were recorded in these ancient manuscripts to make it easier for the overlords to collect taxes and to keep records of the population at any given time. When the overlords acquired lands by either force or as gifts from their rulers, they created charters of ownership for themselves and their vassals.
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 Pollock 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 Pollock descendants.