From Germanic 'Engel' (angel) or the Norse god Ing, plus 'hramn' (raven).
Ingram is a composite of two Old Norse elements: *Ing*, the name of an ancient Germanic fertility deity associated with peace, abundance, and the harvest, and *hrafn*, meaning raven — that most intelligent and symbolically loaded of birds. The resulting meaning, something like 'Ing's raven' or 'raven of the god Ing,' is richly pagan in character, connecting the name to the same mythological substrate as names like Ingrid and Ingo. It arrived in England with the Normans and became reasonably common in medieval England, appearing in records from the twelfth century onward.
The name produced a notable medieval bearer in Ingram de Umfraville, a Scottish nobleman who played a complicated diplomatic role during the Wars of Scottish Independence at the turn of the fourteenth century — appearing in both English and Scottish records as political winds shifted. As a surname, Ingram persisted more robustly than as a given name; the American business magnate Robert Ingram and the Ingram Book Company, which became one of the largest book distributors in the world, kept the surname in commercial circulation through the twentieth century. As a given name, Ingram fell away by the seventeenth century, making it genuinely rare today rather than merely unfashionable.
This rarity is its gift: it carries real medieval English weight, an evocative Norse mythology root, and zero associations with any particular cultural era or celebrity. For parents drawn to the Anglo-Norse revival names like Ingrid and Magnus, Ingram offers the same family of sounds with even greater obscurity.