Where the Ward name comes from

There are two Wards and they are not related. The English one is the ward, a civil guard or keeper of the watch, the same word that gives warden and guard, and it can also be the Old English werd, a marsh, given to whoever lived on one. The Irish one is Mac an Bhaird, son of the bard, a bard being a poet and a storyteller, and it also appears as O'Ward. The oldest public record of the surname is from 1176, and it stood 31st in the United Kingdom in 1991 and 79th in the United States in 2010.