The Name

The place it points to

The derivation accepted by the College of Arms and by the standard name dictionaries is the town of Daumeray on the Loir, in Maine-et-Loire on the old border of Anjou and Normandy: the family "of Daumeray", d'Aumerai, d'Amory. A rival tradition, kept alive by the French Damerys, derives the name from Damery on the Marne in Champagne. The two need not quarrel; names, like families, can have more than one home. And a third school, followed by Patronymica Britannica and Anderson's dictionaries, derives the whole Amery and Emery cluster not from a place at all but from a Germanic personal name, the Gothic Amalric (Emerich in Germany), with the D' added later as a dignity. The name may have more than one spring. The fuller discussion is in the book: The name and its many spellings.

One name, many coats

Clerks spelt by ear, and a person's name could change its clothes between his baptism and his burial. The same family appears as Damery, Damerie, Damory, d'Amory, Dammery, Damry, and shades into Amery and Emery in Devon and Somerset. When three twentieth-century researchers on three continents compared notes (Norman Damery in Cork, Judy Wight in Utah, Ted Dammery in Melbourne), their letters conducted a genial three-cornered argument about the very word at the top of the tree. None of them was wrong. The French cousins' history traces the drift furthest of all: Dammritter, Damrit, Damry, D'aimery, Damory, Doumeray, settling at last as Damery from the fifteenth century.

The medieval family

The documented spine begins with Sir Robert Damory (d. 1285) of Bucknell and Woodperry in Oxfordshire, his son Sir Richard (d. 1330), sheriff and Constable of Oxford Castle, and Richard's brother Roger d'Amory (d. 1322), favourite of Edward II, husband of Elizabeth de Clare, lord of Usk, dead in the barons' revolt.

Their arms, the barry nebuly, stand in glass at Tewkesbury Abbey and at the head of this site; and in the church at Bicester, a few miles from their Bucknell manor, a researcher in 2000 reported an inscription remembering the Damerys as "ancient gentlemen of this district".

Their story is told in the book, and their heraldry on the Arms page.

The counties after

After the medieval barons, the name settles in two English counties.

In Gloucestershire there is a hamlet called Damery by Tortworth, with Damery Woods and Damery bridge; landowners Henry Damerie of Tortworth (1365) and Walter (1399); and the later families of Yate and Codrington ("Cotherington"), whose Gyles D'Amorie had the old coat confirmed by Clarenceux King of Arms in 1592.

In Devon, the Damerys of Chappell in the parish of Bishops Nympton, from John Damerie of South Molton (c. 1500). From one of these counties, on the balance of the evidence, came the Damerys of Bandon, County Cork, documented there from Richard Damery of Ballymodan (born about 1720): the family of this site. Which county, and by what crossing, is the one great open question of the research.