Family name origins & meanings
- English : topographic name for someone who lived by a clump of bushes or by a patch of bracken. Brake ‘thicket’ and brake ‘bracken’ were homonyms in Middle English. The first is from Old English bracu; the second is by folk etymology from northern Middle English braken, -en being taken as a plural ending. After the words had fallen together, their senses also became confused.
- North German : habitational name from any of several places so named, notably the town on the Weser, or a topographic name from Middle Low German brāk ‘clearing’, ‘coppice’.
- Wilhelm Joseph Dietrich, Baron von Brake, of Hannover (Germany), is said to have settled in Nansemond, VA, about 1730. His son Johann Jacob (John) Brake was the progenitor of the VA and WV Brakes; another son, also named Jacob Brake, settled in Edgecombe Co., NC, in 1742, where he sired seven sons and two daughters.