"In every conceivable manner, the family is linked to our past, bridge to our future" Alex Haley 1921 - 1992

The origin of the Jaap surname

	From Uddingston, Mr Jopp writes that his surname is not common in Scotland. I can find only one other, in Ayr, and half a dozen in Aberdeen. Mr Jopp's grandfather fits in, as he was born in Aberdeenshire. The link there goes back at least to 1773 when Lord Provost James Jopp presented the freedom of the city to Dr Johnson who was visiting in the course of his famous tour to the Hebrides with Boswell. He was much pleased with the tribute and wore the elegant Latin diploma on a riband in his hat when walking the city streets, as was then the custom George Black in his superb “Surnames of Scotland” considers Jopp a sharpened form of the personal name Job, and Reaney in his “British Dictionary of Surnames” adds that this could be a nickname for the Hebrew Job, a persecuted character in medieval plays. The surname is also thinly scattered throughout England, and Reaney's book gives many more variants than we have here and adds origins other than Job. He quotes, for instance, Matthew le Jope as from the now obsolete “joppe”, meaning “a fool”. Jupp is a form rather more common in Scotland and, oddly enough, it is also by far the most frequent of the varied forms in London. If not from Job, this could come from a maker or carrier of jubbes, a Middle English word for a four-gallon cask holding liquor. Alternatively, in olden times men wore a lengthy woollen garment called a jube or jupe, and the surname may be stretched to cover a maker of these. However, four-letter names, often with varying vowel sounds, are particularly difficult to fit firmly into an unequivocal meaning. Japp, the third variant, is easily the most numerous in Scotland, and I think the only one peculiarly Scottish. A David Jape or Yeap witnessed several charters at Scone in the early 13th century, and there are occasional occurrences of Jaip and Jap for five centuries following till finally there is an Ayrshire merchant, Matthew Jaap, whose name is given also as Jop, Today Japp occurs most often in Fife and Glasgow. It is the earliest form I have found and I have doubts about the attribution to the personal name Job. The only Japp I have come across who has attained any celebrity is Alexander Hay Japp, born at Dun near Montrose in 1837. He was an author, editor and publisher who wrote indefatigably on many subjects sometimes under various aliases. He visited Robert Louis Stevenson at Braemar in 1881, where the first chapters of a new book, “The Sea Cook”, were read to him.He negotiated its publication as a serial in “Young Folks” and it subsequently became Stevenson's first great success as “Treasure Island”. I found no one surnamed Japp within Aberdeenshire or Banffshire, but was enlivened by a fine flourish of the diminutive form Jappy all round the North-east coast and all the way up to Helmsdale and Caithness. Seventy years ago there were 29 heads of fishing families named Jappy in Buckie, east of the Burn, and at the time of writing there is exactly the same number of the name in the telephone directory for that small township. This illustrates the strong influence of fisherfolk's intermarriage on a surname's frequency. Surprisingly, in Scotland there are more people named Jappy than all the Jopps, Japps and Jupps put together.
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