Snapedom

Further to the above, I've been looking at the name Tobias. Such is my ignorance (Jewish, here), I didn't realise that the Book of Tobias/Tobit is one of the books that is considered apocryphal by Protestants, but is part of the Catholic bible. So the name Tobias is more likely to be given in Catholic families.

Obviously I'm out on a limb here, but here I go.

Tobias Snape's family origins were Lancashire Catholic.

There. *ducks*

On the assumption that the given name Tobias was extremely unusual before the 1960s and is therefore likely to have been an 'inherited' family name, I repeated my analysis of the 1901 census, with the following results:

Born overseas     85
Lancashire   45
London    44 (most of these the offspring of Tobiases born overseas)
Yorkshire   33
Cornwall   26
Lincolnshire   19
Staffordshire   10
Rest <10

Not quite as clear as the results for Snape, but pretty suggestive.  Map here.

I've analysed the distribution of Snapes in the 1901 census because (i) it is the most recent census available and (ii) it gives a very good indication of surname distribution, coming just as the population began to be very mobile. I have looked at the counties of birth of heads of households only, both for simplicity and because the explosion of social mobility meant that people were moving and marrying out of county enough to blur the results.

The results are very clear, the top counties of birth being:

Lancashire 336
Staffordshire 122
Cheshire 44
Warwickshire 37
Yorkshire 28
Derbyshire 25
London 15

which pretty well settles my internal debate over which side of the Pennines Snape was likely to have been born. Yay for the north-west!

And there is a big map on my LJ.