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Thank you for visiting the Phare Family History Website. I hope this will become a resource for the genealogy and study of the PHARE name and its variants, and provide a place for researchers to make contact with each other, list our areas of common interest and share valuable resources.
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Origins of the name are possibly from the Old English "faeyer" meaning "fair, beautiful" or the French "Phare" meaning "Lighthouse" or "Beacon" according to the historical practice of naming a person for their profession i.e Light Keeper.
What could be an early example of the name appears as Edeva Faira in the Doomesday Book of 1066. Later we have Henry Le Vayre in the Minister Accounts of the Earldom of Cornwall in 1297.
Colonel Robert Phaire of the Grange Co. Cork, Governor of the City of Cork under Oliver Cromwell, signed the warrant for the Execution of Charles I.
From the 17th Century until the Mid to Late 19th Century the name Phare was almost exclusively found in the West Country of England with the vast majority of Phare's living in an area of North West Devon and East Cornwall comprising of the Devonshire Parishes of Beaworthy, Bratton Clovelly, Halwill, Highampton, Inwardleigh, North Lew, Okehampton, Sampford Courtenay, Sheepwash and Thrushelton and the Cornish Parishes of Calstock, & Callington. With another group in the Exeter region of South Devon.
From the mid 19th Century with the increased industrialization of Great Britain, and the improved communications brought about by the advent of the Railways, we begin to see a slow drift of the name away from the "homelands" of Devon and Cornwall to other parts of the United Kingdom and further a field to The Commonwealth and the United States of America.
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