The 3 sons of Walter Raleigh

English gentleman Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618)
Walter Raleigh

Sir Walter Raleigh, the English gentleman and New World explorer, didn’t have a whole bunch of kids — just three sons. But two of those three sons had rather unusual names…

  • Damerei, born in 1592
  • Walter, born in 1593
  • Carew, baptized in 1605

Walter’s name is easy enough to figure out…but where do “Carew” and “Damerei” come from?

Carew was a surname that could be found on both sides of the family tree, coincidentally — both in Walter Raleigh’s family and in the family of his wife, Elizabeth.

Damerei was based on the surname D’amerie, which was supposedly a surname in Walter Raleigh’s tree that connected him to Henry I. (This was according to a historian Raleigh had hired, probably for the very purpose of cooking up some noble/royal ancestry.)

Which of these three names do you like most?

Sources:

2 thoughts on “The 3 sons of Walter Raleigh

  1. Fixed. Thanks.

    I’ve been doing a lot of 1950s pop culture posts lately so it doesn’t surprise me at all that I’d transpose those numbers. :)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.