texified

    During my study of my family’s genealogy, I became interested in surnames.   Perhaps it is because I have such a common surname, but when I encountered some of the more unusual surnames in my family history, they tended to attract my notice.  The history of surnames is interesting also.  In most parts of the world people were only given one name with no surname.  This varies by region however with some areas, China for example, having had surnames since 2852 BC, almost five thousand years if the legends are true.  Surnames were gradually adopted in most countries with some, Turkey and Japan, only adopting surnames fairly recently.

I soon learned that most of the surnames in my family background could be categorized into about four categories: (here is a good site discussing this)

Occupation: Some names reflected the person’s job.  Smith is so common because almost every community had somebody that worked in metal (black referred to the appearance of iron).  Other occupational surnames include: Cooper (maker of barrels), Taylor, Fletcher (putting feathers on arrows), Carpenter, Miller, Tanner, Mason, Chandler (candles), Crowder (played the Crowd, a medieval stringed instrument!),etc., etc.  Some of the occupations, once so common, are no longer around.  Here is a list of some of the more common occupational surnames.

Location: Names indicating place of origin.  For example one of my family names is Ham.  It appears that the Hebrew meaning of this name is “hot.”  However the English origin of Ham, referring to a house, borough or village, is probably where my family got the name.  Names ending with these location suffixes include:  -ley and -leigh referring to a clearing, also hill, brook, well, and -ton, -wick, and -stead referring to a farm.  Also surnames of this class could have originated from an attempt to differentiate a person: John of Topeka, Ralph from Wichita, etc.

Patronymics: These refer to  names  which refer to the father’s name.  Some end in -son or -sen: Olafson, Erickson, Anderson, etc. often of Scandinavian origin.  Other endings indicating “son of” in other countries include the following: -Ap (Welsh), Mac (Scot), Fitz (Norman), -wiecz (Polish), -poulos (Greece), -ez (Spanish).  These later became shortened and modified further increasing the variety of names.

Characteristics: These surnames referred to some aspect of the person, his appearance or personality.  Eric the Red, Black John (Black often referred to the person’s hair).  Longfellow is another name referring of course to a tall person.  One must be careful though because some obvious names are not so obvious (e.g. stout could refer to an easily irritated and noisy person).

     I have a few names which give me problems.  Their origin is interesting to speculate upon:

Plair: this is probably a derivation of Player which is an occupational surname of an actor or musician or a nickname for somebody in sporting contests.  Or so some say.  Another possibility is the French plaire: to please.

Petill: I have no idea what the derivation of this is.  This entire line is a source of frustration.  I suspect it is of French origin since many of this surname are French and since it is said that my great great grandmother of this name was French.