{"id":11492,"date":"2025-07-31T06:48:00","date_gmt":"2025-07-31T10:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=11492"},"modified":"2026-01-04T13:14:20","modified_gmt":"2026-01-04T18:14:20","slug":"what-did-you-say-your-name-is","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=11492","title":{"rendered":"What Did You Say Your Name Is?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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An interest in family history has led me down many intriguing paths and arcane byways. Naturally, my interest was piqued by a recent story in Natural History<\/em> magazine by Samuel M. Wilson, \u201cHow Surnames Came to Be.\u201d Do you know the origins of your surname? Enter it here<\/a> and find out its original meaning and where people with your surname live all around the world .<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My father was the child of Hungarian immigrants, and their five sons spelled the last name variously as Hegyi, Hedge, Hegge, and Hadde. It took ages for me to find my grandfather on a ship manifest, because he spelled it using the Latin spelling, Heggus. I\u2019d forgotten that Latin was the official language of Hungary until the mid-1800s<\/a>. The name attracts some jokesters too, as the picture attests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My mother\u2019s family isn\u2019t necessarily easier to research. Her father\u2019s last name, Edwards, is straightforward, but surnames on both sides of her family have inspired creative spelling: Woollen, Standifer, McClure. You have to take into consideration that even into the mid-1800s, many Americans could not read or write, and the clerks who recorded their names in church records, land transactions, and court documents relied on phonetic approximation. And maybe they didn\u2019t hear so good, either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though some small and remote societies today still do not use surnames, Wilson says the earliest English efforts to develop them began about a thousand years ago. The kings wanted to identify all their subjects in order to levy taxes (a fine old governmental preoccupation). There, and elsewhere in Europe, surnames were often created from where the person lived: a town name or \u201cFord,\u201d \u201cWood,\u201d \u201cHill.\u201d I have friends with all those names. \u201cDe Bilt\u201d is a town in the Netherlands where the Vanderbilt family originated. Some names, like Wright, Cooper, Smith, etc., referred to a profession.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Often the last name started out as a patronymic, indicating who the father was: Johnson, Carlsen, Wilson, and so on. The prefixes Mac, Mc, O\u2019 and Fitz also originally indicated \u201cson of,\u201d as, did the suffixes -ez in Spanish, -ski in Poland, and -vich in Russian. Some languages use a slightly different naming convention for daughters. In Scandinavia, you\u2019d find Lavransdottir, and in Poland Kowalska, -not ski. In Slavic languages, a son of Ivan might have the surname Ivanov, and his sister the surname Ivanova. Of course, she may lose that distinction when she marries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When populations become big enough, too many people with the same name can be confusing. The United States has more than three million living males named John. Perhaps reflecting the higher-born\u2019s more frequent interaction with the authorities, Wilson writes, \u201cIn all known cases, [adopting surnames] began with the highest ranking tiers of society.\u201d You may recall how in Tudor history, a Duke like Norfolk would be called Norfolk and also referred to by his family name Howard. Very confusing. Patterns of giving sons in multiple generations the same names mostly confound genealogists (me!), though sometimes the repetition suggests the Arthur you found is indeed from a family peppered with Arthurs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was interested to learn that some countries (Denmark, Germany), have approved lists of gender-specific first<\/em> names. In Germany the name cannot be \u201cthe name of a product or common object, and cannot be a surname.\u201d No Moon Unit Zappas there. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, a recent New Yorker<\/em> article about retiring meatpacking district business owner John T. Jobbagy (pronounced Joe<\/u><\/em>-bagee) notes that Jobbagy is Hungarian, like my dad\u2019s family, and you know that instantly because the surname ending in \u201cagy.\u201d Apparently all such surnames, like Nagy, are Hungarian. Who knew?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An interest in family history has led me down many intriguing paths and arcane byways. Naturally, my interest was piqued by a recent story in Natural History magazine by Samuel M. Wilson, \u201cHow Surnames Came to Be.\u201d Do you know … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[41,266,35,104],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-genealogy","category-history","category-real-life","category-the-morgue"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2Zm","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11492"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11492\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11494,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11492\/revisions\/11494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}