Borders
A surname that likely began as a local or boundary-related name, referring to someone who lived near a border or borderland.
The #3,928 most common surname in the United States (2010 Census) — about 1 in every 34,104 Americans shares it.
Etymology
This surname is most likely based on the common English word border, meaning an edge, boundary, or frontier. In surname use, it would have identified someone who lived at or near a borderland, or perhaps someone from a place described that way. The form is straightforwardly English in character, though the exact original border or district is often impossible to pin down.
History
As a surname, Borders is relatively uncommon and appears to fit the broad class of locational surnames that arose from a person's residence near a notable geographic feature. It may also have been reinforced by the medieval and early modern use of 'the Borders' for frontier districts, especially in northern Britain, though that does not prove a single point of origin for every family. Modern bearers are found chiefly in English-speaking countries, especially the United States.
Origin
Regions
Variant spellings
Fun fact
Because borderland was such a familiar medieval idea, surnames built on it could arise independently in more than one place, which makes them especially tricky to trace to one family line.
From the historical record
“SELWOOD (Eng.) Dweller at Selwood (the forest on the borders of Wilts and Somer- set), the A.-Sax. Seal wudu (A. - Sax, Chron. a.d. 894), Seal mydu (a.d. 878) = . app. the ' Willow-Wood ■ [O.E. seal{h (pi. sealas), a willow or sallow] ; but Asser, in his Life of iElfred, translated Seluudu as”
— Surnames of the United Kingdom: a concise etymological dictionary (2 vols in 1)