Recorded in a wide range of spellings including Bombie, Bombay, Bumbie, Bumby, Bumbee, and probably others, this is an English surname. It is locational and apparently from a now 'lost' medieval village which was probably in East Anglia as the suffix ending is that of '-bi', the Viking-Scandanavian word for a farm. East Anglia despite meaning the place of the Eastern English, was a Viking territory based upon its capital the city of York, for several centuries upto the Norman Invasion of 1066. The Vikings have left their mark in several hundred place names., of which this would seem to be one. However there is no such place recorded in any of the known surname spellings. This is not unusual. At least three thousand surnames of the British Isles originate from lost and usually unrecorded villages, and this is almost certainly one of them. Early examples of the surname recordings in the surviving church registers of the dioces of Greater London include Joane Bumby, who was christened at Harrow on the Hill, Middlesex, on August 2nd 1579, Elizabeth Bumbie christened at St Dunstans in the East, Stepney on June 18th 1704, and the exotically named Mary Bombay, who married the somewhat less exotic John Smith at St Martins in the Field, Westminster, on September 29th 1757.

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