The Loveluck Name and Origins

The name Loveluck is certainly a variant of Lovelock which, although not a very common name, was fairly widespread in Wiltshire and neighbouring counties - see the Note on the Lovelock Surname for a list of early references to the name. In a note on the historical background of the name Loveluck, Janet Hearle expressed her opinion that John, progenitor of the Glamorgan Lovelucks, changed his name from Lovelock to Loveluck, probably when he moved from Wiltshire to Glamorgan, S. Wales, and that this change may reflect the Welsh pronunciation of the surname.


John Dixon is not convinced that John L changed his name from Lovelock to Loveluck when he moved to Glamorgan. He has proposed an alternative hypothesis, that the Loveluck name precedes John Loveluck (1739/40-1803), and cites as evidence a number of earlier parish records for Lovelucks.

However, it should be mentioned that there is another family which definitely has its origins in Wiltshire - the Lyneham Line- which extends into Glamorgan, and for which there appears to be a change from the Lovelock to the Loveluck form even more recently.

Other evidence that the Loveluck form of the name was not the original form includes the following:

Janet Hearle also suggested (see the notes on The Early Loveluck Family of Glamorgan) that John Lovelock's move from Wiltshire to Glamorgan was associated with the fact that the Talbot family had estates in both areas. I have not found in Janet's notes conclusive evidence to support this hypothesis, although it is certainly the case that several Lovelucks rented farms and land on the Margam estates and, according to Janet, Margam Estate accounts for 1788-9 record that John L. held land in Kenfig and a cot and garden in Margam.

A number of people, and in particular Janet Hearle, have attempted to trace the origins of John Lovelock/Loveluck in Wiltshire (or elsewhere) but no-one has succeeded so far to establish with certainty where he came from. Encouraged by Robert Sterry, I enlarged the scope of my family history research to the Lovelock name, and discovered that there was a fairly active community of people researching the Lovelock name in Wiltshire and elsewhere; I have since established a Lovelock Web Site as a focus for this activity.

Although I have not been able to establish with certainty that John Loveluck had his roots as John Lovelock in Wiltshire, I have located some likely candidates. In particular, the Parish Register for Ramsbury Wilts. includes the following baptism record:

1739 Oct 21, John son of Thomas & Mary Lovelock

as well as a baptism record for the Thomas Lovelock, probably the father of this John Lovelock: 

1704 July 21 Thomas the son of Thomas Lovelock, Labourer, was baptised same day
However, there are a quite a few John Lovelocks born in Wiltshire and surrounding counties at about this time, and it is far from easy to sort out which of them belong to other Lovelock lines, and which are potential candidates for the progenitor of the Glamorgan Loveluck line. Robert Sterry has produced a collection of John Lovelocks born about 1740, with some suggestions as to which of them might belong to the different Lovelock trees which have been constructed.