English
The surname Morgan can be of Welsh,Scottish or Irish in origin.Those with the surname Morgan are very likely to be of Welsh origin,deriving from the Old Welsh Morcant,"sea,bright".Variants of this can be found in Old British,Old Breton,and Cornish as well as Welsh.The Pictish form of the surname in Scotland was Morgunn,a very old Celtic name.Many Welsh family names are quite common due to the fact that when they were becoming hereditary they were mostly derived from only a few common names in use at the time.Only after 1542,did Welsh surnames become fixed,when England and Wales were united by a Parliamentry Act.A great majority of the Welsh people formed their surnames from the names of their fathers or grandfathers.For instance Lewis"hear,fight",Griffith"fierce lord",and Morgan"great,bright" descended from forebears with those names.Morgan is one of the oldest and commonest of Welsh names,but there is also a Scottish clan Morgan,established from medieval times in Aberdeen.The Scottish name is thus probably not merely the result of Welsh migration,but was established independantly.In Ireland the name can also sometimes represent a previous Morogh.The name dates back as far as the tenth century were a Morganus is recorded in historical archives.One of the first fore fathers to bring this name to America is that of a Miles Morgan,who came from Bristol to America in 1636,he was a founder of Springfield.He built a blockhouse which he defended against the Indians in the sacking of Springfield in 1675. Morgan is the fifty-first most common name in America.