Peveril/Peverill in Nova Scotia; UK Hatfield connection
I am not related to the PEVERIL/PEVERELLE surnames but found some info that may be helpful to some.
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Looking through Canada's phone listings, there are 41 PEVERILL and 18 PEVERIL names, almost all of them in Nova Scotia (I remember a PEVERIL family when I grew up in Yarmouth, NS).
Spellings of PEVERELL or PEVERELLE are concentrated more in Ontario and westward toward British Columbia.
It is likely that more research will be done to see how these variant spellings are related to one another. The surname is relatively rare in Canada, so it is likely that they are indeed related, but perhaps 4 generations or more, going back in time.
While doing research today on my mother's HATFIELD lines, I came across hand-written notes of recollection by an older man in 1990 whose grandmother's sister (his great aunt) had told him when he was a young boy that the name of DE PEVEREL was linked to the Hatfield's of Greatoaks Estate, some 20 miles NNE of London, and that 'de Peverel' was a name from the days of William the Conqueror. I knew the story about Greatoaks but was not aware of any connection with the name DE PEVEREL until I read these notes. The author stated that he doubted many in the Hatfield lines would be aware of this link because it has not likely been written up in the standard reference books on HATFIELD.
The Hatfield's were religious dissenters who had connections with the UK, Holland, and Germany, fled from Oliver Cromwell and Charles II, settled in New Amsterdam (later NYC) and Elizabethtown, New Jersey, in the mid-1600's, and finally arrived in southern Nova Scotia as United Empire Loyalists in 1783/4. Many settled in Yarmouth County, NS.
The Hatfield estate outside London was the location where the young Princess Elizabeth (later Elizabeth I) was banished by her father Henry VIII during the period she was declared by Henry as 'illegitimate' after her mother Anne Boleyn was beheaded.