Woodburn Surname and Variants

Woodburn
Scottish: habitational name from places named Woodburn in Ayrshire, Kincardineshire, and Midlothian, and in Northumberland, all named from Old English wudu ‘wood’ + burna ‘stream’, i.e. a stream flowing through a wood.
Dictionary of American Family Names, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-508137-4

In the ancient Scottish-English border region, the ancestors of the name Woodburn lived among the Boernicians. They lived in any of a number of places of the same name in Ayrshire, Kincardine, and Midlothian. The place-name Woodburn comes from the Old English words, wudu and burna, which mean wood and stream. The place-name referred to a stream which ran through the woods. The original bearer of the surname Woodburn would have lived near such a stream.

Spelling rules only evolved in the last few centuries with the invention of the printing press and the first dictionaries. Spelling variations are extremely common in names from before that period. Woodburn has been spelled Woodburn, Woodburne, Woodbine, Woodbourne, Whiteburn and many more.

First found in Northumberland, where they held a family seat from very ancient times, before and after the Norman Conquest of 1066.

After making their great crossing, many Boernician-Scottish families settled along the east coast of North America. When the War of Independence broke out, United Empire Loyalists moved north to Canada while the rest stayed to fight. The ancestors of many of these Scots still populate the continent. This century, through clan societies and other Scottish organizations, they began to rediscover their collective national heritage. Analysis of immigration records indicates that some of the first North American immigrants bore the name Woodburn or a variant listed above: Mary Woodburne, who came to in Virginia in 1685 with her husband; as well as James W. Robert and William Woodburn, who both arrived in Philadelphia between 1864-1878.