During the Middle Ages surnames were first used in order to distinguish between numbers of people bearing the same christian name. As taxation, under William The Conqueror, who invaded England in 1066, became the law, documentation became essential, and names were chosen from a man's trade, his father's name, some personal physical characteristic, or from his place of residence. In the case of ADSHEAD it was a locational name from ADSHEAD, some spot in the neighbourhood of Prestbury, County Chester. The surname has crossed the Atlantic to America. The name is also spelt ADSHED. The earliest of the name on record appears to be John Wilkinson and Margret ADSHED, who were married at Prestbury Church, Cheshire in the year 1560, and Isabell ADSHED was baptised at the same church in 1612. Surnames derived from placenames are divided into two broad categories; topographic names and habitation names. Topographic names are derived from general descriptive references to someone who lived near a physical feature such as an oak tree, a hill, a stream or a church. Habitation names are derived from pre-existing names denoting towns, villages and farmsteads. Other classes of local names include those derived from the names of rivers, individual houses with signs on them, regions and whole countries. Renold ADSHED of Pott Shrigley, near Prestbury, was recorded in East Cheshire in 1579, and Philip Platt and Dorothy ADSHAD were married at St. James's, Clerkenwell, London in the year 1731. Over the centuries, most people in Europe have accepted their surname as a fact of life, as irrevocable as an act of God. However much the individual may have liked or disliked the surname, they were stuck with it, and people rarely changed them by personal choice. A more common form of variation was in fact involuntary, when an official change was made, in other words, a clerical error. Among the humbler classes of European society, and especially among illiterate people, individuals were willing to accept the mistakes of officials, clerks and priests as officially bestowing a new version of their surname, just as they had meekly accepted the surname they had been born with. In North America, the linguistic problems confronting immigration officials at Ellis Island in the 19th century were legendary as a prolific source of Anglicization.