What's in a name?

I was recently directed to this website by a friend who had inquired about the origins of the Conibear name. I had very little or no real knowledge other than its main origins in the UK are from the South West. It turns out that the National Trust have published a study by UCL documenting the changes in surname distribution in the UK from the 1881 and 1998 census data. Simply plug in your surname and find out many interesting facts about its distribution, frequency and ethnicity and other such fascinating statistics.

Looking at the origins of Conibear, it gives it as a "locational name" which is further categorised into either Compass position; generic feature; place; or settlement ending; of which we fall into the latter. Examples within this same category are -brook, -tree, -cliffe, -house, -bush etc etc. From their data it appears that the "-bear" portion of our name maybe a derivation of the word "beer", and names that fall within this same category are Bradbeer, Conibear, Conybeare, Godbeer, Sedgebeer and Shillabeer. All very interesting, and something that I have never considered before. Unless I am missing a now unused definition of the word beer, am I descended from a line of villagers who ran the local brewery?

If you check the census for 1998 there is a very light shading in the Manchester area to show our presence but clearly the majority of our clan are still down in the SW. In 1998 the Conibear name was only found in 6 per million names in the UK (this was down by 3 names per million since 1881)! This by my calculations is only is only about 35-40 in the whole country, of which we probably knew personally around 30% of! Scarily there is another Tim Conibear from Bristol who is on Facebook but I havent been brave enought to say hello to yet.