Links to other Kimberlin Sites

You’ve probably arrived here from our own Kimberlin Family History pages.   If not, you can follow this link to reach them.

The great majority of Kimberlins are to be found on the other side of the Atlantic, presumably having migrated from Germany and Scandinavia.  The surname is very rare in England, where I’ve most thoroughly researched our own branch – the Kimberlins of north Warwickshire.  But I do have some details of other Kimberlin families also.

The Kimberlin Library at de Montfort University in Leicester was named after A H W Kimberlin, Lord Mayor of the city in the nineteen-sixties, who died in 1976 – one of the Kimberlins of Market Bosworth.

There’s a Kimberlin Club on the Isle of Portland, off Weymouth in Dorset.   The derivation of its name is fascinating:  a “kimberlin” is apparently the local word for someone born on Portland (though Thomas Hardy, in ‘The Well-Beloved’, uses the word to mean the exact opposite – a mainlander).  A Portland native recently wrote to me as follows:

“I was told about the meaning of the word kimberlin as a child.  It was very important, in terms of one’s acceptability, to be the child of a kimberlin rather than just one of those dreadful people from ‘over the water’.  Even though I was educated in Weymouth and my mother was from over the water and hated Portland and made no bones about it, I was accepted and other children were allowed to play with me, which otherwise they would not have been.  It was a very inward-looking society.  ...  I remember reading a sociology textbook which had a wealth of detail about Portland, the special language (including words like kimberlin) and customs (the one that sticks in my mind is that Portland men, according to the author, would not marry until their prospective brides were four months pregnant) ...”

And of course there’s a wealth of other sites on the web to help you with your Kimberlin and other genealogical researches.

Do you know of other good sites to add to this page?   Please e-mail me if so!

John & Liz’s Family History          John & Liz’s welcome page

page revised August 2012