About last names...

[hatman]

Every once in a while, I wonder about last names.

There was a time, several hundred years ago, when people didn't have last names. You had a first name, and then some distinguishing fact. Maybe it was your father's name. You'd be Erik, John's son. Or maybe you were the acknowledged bastard of some local noble, in which case you'd be Brian, Fitz (bastard of) Patrick. Or maybe it would be the family business, particularly if it was a prestigious one, like Smith or Miller. Or maybe it was the place where you'd grown up - you were the Robert from the local village of Rosefield (or perhaps Rosenfeld), or you'd come from the prestigious and sophisticated city of Vienna (and thus were named "Weiner" - which is only a small part of how I got my family name, but never mind that just now).

And then something changed. Last names happened. I don't know how or why. Was it by royal decree? Was it that the king took on a last name in order to tout his lineage, which then, of course, became the noble fashion, and it spread from there? Was it just some cultural change? Something else?

Think of what it must have been like during that transition.

John, Erik's son, fathered Michael, John's son. He, in turn, fathered... Robert Johnson. Which must have been very confusing for the older generations. His name is Johnson, but he's Michael's boy?

Brian was born into a family of millers, but there wasn't really a place for him there. His older brothers did the work of maintaining the mill, and he'd never really gotten the hang of all that complex machinery (the pinnacle of power-generating technology). There was no way he could go off to some other town and build a mill of his own. But he was pretty good at working with the flour produced by the mill. So he became Brian Miller... the baker.

And what of David Rosenfeld, whose family had moved out of town a generation before, but who had himself been born and raised in Hamburg?

All these people with names that should have described something about them, but that didn't really fit. I guess it'd have helped that many others of their generation were going through the same thing... but not all of them would have. Not the ones born shortly before the change took place. Did Robert Johnson's oldest brother stay George, Michael's son? Did he become George Michaelson? Or George Johnson?

It just seems like it all would have been very weird. I wonder what it was actually like.

Comments

[rainbow]

If you end up researching it, I'd love to read your conclusions.

My guesses from doing genealogical research are that it was a gradual process that happened over centuries and depended on where you were, how big of a community you were part of, your status, how literate your community was, and probably a whole lot of other things, and the forms the names took varied greatly by region (whether patronymic/matronymic; descriptive by looks, job, oddity, etc; locale, etc. And then throw in all the different languages.

I do know that in the US as recently as the late 19th century, spellings of names varied dramatically, due to lack of literacy (you go thte spelling the person writing down your name guessed at if you didn't know it), whim (I want to spell my name THIS way, not THAT way, for reason x, y, or z), and heritage (Catherine vs Katherine vs Katerin, etc., plus variants and diminutives).

I love reading etymology of surnames, since so many are descriptives (Goldwater makes me laugh!).

And now the name John Smallberries from Buckaroo Banzai is stuck in my head. I blame you *g*

[nicki]

If you ever want to laugh at genealogists, look up French surnames. They changed if the family moved, were given differently depending on which area of the country your family was in, were often based on physical appearance and belonged to only one person so you might have Guillaume, son of Robert le Gros (the large or the fat), who had a big nose, so he was Guillaume le Nez (the nose), Fils de Robert le Gros (William Lanay FitzRobert or William FitzRobert Lanay if he wandered over to England from Normandy) and he had at least one middle name, possibly carried his mother's name, and he had a saint's name as well (so that the saint would be watching over him). So in records he might be any of that, unless, of course, he was a traveling knight, a younger son seeking his fortune, someone who had been cast out of the family or was on the run or who simply didn't want their family identifiable for some reason, in which case he might be any of that, or William any of that LaRue or DuChemin. So in a will or legal document you might have William Olivier Paul Dumont Lanay FitzRobert LaRue deMaisonBleu (William Oliver Paul, the nose, of the mountain, son of Robert, on the road, who lives in the Blue House. But he was probably called Jean. (well, probably not exactly Jean, but something that had NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH HIS NAME)

My grandmother has SEVEN NAMES, three of which are last names (mother's maiden, own maiden, married). All of her relatives had the same issue. Her aunt? was called Caddie, which was not any part of her many many names but was the only one anyone used for her casually so the stories didn't match with the documents in, ya know, any way at all.

[stellar_dust]

They still have patronymic names in Iceland! In fact they recently passed a law that you're not ALLOWED to give your son or daughter anything but a "normal" Icelandic first name followed by patro/matrinymic.

[doranwen.livejournal.com]

Hmm, that IS a thought. I never really thought about that before (though I knew that's where most last names came from). I wonder if there's some book somewhere that goes into all that?

[beansideirae.livejournal.com]

i've wondered about this too, but never carried the thought that far. very interesting! if you ever find out anything about it, let me know :)

my last name comes from a bird. i have no idea why our family was named after a bird, and i've always wondered. it's on our coat of arms and everything. the first known ancestors to carry the name were knights and such, so you'd think they would have something more...war-like, i guess.

also, i did not know the meaning of "fitz". that puts all those aristocratic-sounding fitz-so and so's, in a new light.

[pgwfolc.livejournal.com]

My mom's maiden name meant "little pigeon" before it was shortened. No idea why.

But hey, you have a family crest. That's pretty cool. Though it would be interesting to hear the story of how a noble house got to be named after a bird.

And yeah, fitz is kind of interesting, too. Although there is a hint of nobility about it. It comes from a time and a place where being a nobleman's by-blow still put you a step above commoners, perhaps even gave you a chance of inheriting, depending on circumstances.