Where Do I find the Meaning of Surnames?

The Meaning of Surnames – Probably, at some point of your life, you will feel curious to know about your heritage, and this question, might imply many other questions at the time like; Who your ancestors were? What have they done with their lives? Where did they originally came from? How is it that your family ended by living in a certain place? What is the country of origin of your surname? What does your surname means?

Without disregarding the other questions, the meaning of surnames is a very interesting question itself, and of course, is a complex one, and related to many issues.

Historically speaking the need of governments to collect taxes, has a lot to do with the need of correctly identifying people and thus of the need of generalizing the use of surnames. Surnames were adopted between the 11^th and the 16^th century in England; the 16^th and the 19^th century in Wales and the 11^th and the 19^th century in Scotland.

If you intend to introduce yourself to the world of surname meaning search, you shouldn´t disregard that the meaning of most surnames in use nowadays. Either relate to a person name -normally a male ancestor- (patronymic surnames), a place name (topographical surnames), a physical characteristic of an ancestor (descriptive surnames), or to an activity performed by an ancestor (occupational surnames).

PATRONYMIC SURNAMES

“Patronymic surnames” are surnames derived from names.

• Shouldn´t be confused with patronymics still in use in Russia and Slavs countries.  Russian patronymics look like surnames and are normally used between a name and a surname. For example if someone is called Anna Petrovna Milhanovich, “Petrovna” means daughter of Peter, and is her “patronymic” while Milhanovich is her surname.  In this particular case, Milhanovich happens to be a patronymic surname, as the finishing “vich” does also mean “son of”.  So in this example, our Anna is the daughter of Peter, but probably one of her ancestors on her father branch was called Milhano.   If your surname has a Slav origin, there is a big chance you have a patronymic surname.
• There are a lot of examples of patronymic surnames with other origins.  For example, in English surnames, the end “son” is evidence of a patronymic surname (Anderson, Johnson), while for Italian patronymic surnames the current termination is “ini” (Giacomini, Paolini). In French we can see the preposition “of” attached to the name of the father (Desimone, Dejean, “de” meaning “of”). In German language the suffixes “sohn” and “son” are employed, from which are derived the Danish “ sen” (Andersen, Nielsen). In the Celtic language the prefix “Mac” –also seen as Mc- does also mean “son” and evidences the existence of a patronymic surname (MacDonald or McDonald).  In Ireland, this prefix can also be transformed in Mag or M’. However, in Irish surnames, is more common the use of the prefix “O”  (O’Donnell). In Semitic, Arab and Hebrew languages, we currently see the prefix “ben” (son) in patronymic surnames (Mohamed ben Yusef means “Mohamed son of Yusef”).

TOPOGRAPHICAL SURNAMES

• These surnames take their name from a town, region, district or place where our ancestor lived or owned land. Many are preceded by the preposition “of”, or “of the” (Brook, Ribera, De la Vega).

OCCUPATIONAL SURNAMES

• The work serves as a means of identification, and centuries ago it was usual to make reference to people by their professions: Warrior or Labrador are some examples.

DESCRIPTIVE SURNAMES

• If your surname is White, or Moreno, your ancestors might have had clear or dark skin or hair. On many occasions the last name used corresponds to a physical characteristic and/or a nickname. Over the years, those nicknames might have tended to be inherited and thus could have been the origin for certain surnames.

Surnames origin is influenced by the ancestor’s social class and the culture that they lived in.  Those of higher social status used to take surnames that are uncommon today while people of lower social status were keener on taking the most common surnames known today.

A surname is usually passed down from the male ancestors, but some countries like Brazil have different regulations.  So if  I were a Brazilian descendant from Portuguese emigrants for example, I might find a gap when trying to find my family tree, because beginning by myself, my surname would come from my mother´s ascendants but going up I would find at some point that surnames would come from the male branch.  In some other cases the surname could have been passed down from the female ancestors due to extenuating circumstances i.e. (illegitimacy, posthumous birth, inheritance etc.). Some cultures also use a combination of both the mother and father’s surnames (Uruguay is an example in South America of this tradition).

When researching about the meaning of surnames one thing you should be aware of  is that the spelling or the written version of a surname can change over the years, so there could be a list of similar surnames nowadays working as different surnames, that might derivate from an unique surname. So if you do not find right away the meaning of your surname, a good tip is to try checking similar surnames to get a clue. I have a personal story about this with my second surname: Sibils.  In Uruguay the country where I was born, we use by law two surnames: first surname is our father´s first surname, and second surname, our mother´s first surname (so everything comes from male branch).  We have always been aware that Sibils comes from Cataluña in Spain, but until we were contacted by a relative from Spain looking forward to finding relatives in South America, we were not aware of the fact that the surname Cibils, is actually the same surname.  In fact, Cibils was originally written with cedilla, so over the years, some people were registered as Sibils and not as “Çibils”.

Another thing to consider when trying to find the meaning of surnames is that your surname might also have suffered changes over the generations for religious reasons.  For example, many Jewish people have for surnames names of things, like “Castle” or “Woods”.  The reason for this is that their ancestors might have changed their original surname for a new one, to avoid being identified as Jewish at the times of the Catholic Inquisition.

Nowadays, there is a lot of information available at the web, about the meaning and origin of surnames. Using an app or any online resource is a quick and efficient way to do research.  At ancestry.com tools are available to make this search easier and at the same time interesting to you.  The more information you have in advance on surname meanings, the more information you will get from the web.

By, Carmen Vazquez Sibils

How did I manage to find my family tree the “old way”

Finding my family tree has been some sort of adventure. I barely knew where to start – at that time, internet was not yet developed, so this had to be done the old way- but at least I knew the questions I had to find the answers for. What I never imagined, was where this idea would take me to. In fact, I did my research twice, one on my father´s branch and another on my mom´s. In both opportunities, the idea was boosted by someone else, but to find my family tree, has lead me to a very interesting journey.

This story is about 25 years old now. Visiting some second grade cousins, I was approached with a birth certificate belonging to our common great grandmother. She was called Juana Amorena Bonnefois. She was the mother of my father´s mother, but that was the first time I was hearing from her, at least as per her name. I remember my father saying his own origins were mostly Italian and Spanish but that he had -and therefore I had- a small portion of French blood. Just then I found out the connection: Juana was born in France, like her mother was, and our French family name was Bonnefois (by the way, I’ve found it beautiful, as it means “good faith”).

The thing is that one of my cousins was planning a trip to Italy. By that time everybody was talking in our country about a new Italian law that allowed descendants of Italian emigrants to get Italian citizenship and thus passports, by complying with some paperwork (mostly getting birth, marriage and death certificates from their closest Italian ancestors up to them). And he thought it was a great idea to get his Italian passport too. So he proposed me to work together to gather the rest of the documents, so we together with our brothers and sisters could open a family file at the Italian Consulate in Uruguay to apply for the Italian citizenship.

So why starting by Juana I asked? Because -he told me- her birth certificate, is the most concrete data we have, and when looking for this kind of information, it is very important to work based on documents as it is quite easy to make mistakes. Sometimes people research on the wrong family or think their surnames are just spelled or written one way… This is a document, the best way to find our family tree, and if we all gather documents like this and put them together with family stories, we will manage to solve this sort of puzzle. He continued by telling me Juana was born in Bayonne, France and moved to Paris, but at some point she emigrated to Argentina. In Buenos Aires she met our great grandfather, Ferdinando Varini, who himself was born in Reggio Emilia, Italy, and who is our closest common Italian relative. Therefore he added, if we manage to get the citizenship, this will be because of him. I have already contacted someone in Italy he continued, who will get and send me Ferdinando´s birth certificate. Getting our grandparents birth, marriage and death certificates will be an easy task; the problem we have is that our timeline breaks in Buenos Aires. I know by family tales that Juana and Ferdinando got married at the Church of la Merced in Buenos Aires, he told me, but so far I have been unable to get their wedding certificate, and if we do not get it, we won´t be able to comply with all the required paperwork. By the time the wedding took place, there was no Official Registry, so all the records concerning the birth, civil state and death of people was mostly in the hands of the Catholic Church. In the times of President Peron in Buenos Aires, in just one night in 1955, many churches were burned, and La Merced, among them, so all historical records were lost forever, and this was also the destination of the book where Juana´s and Ferdinando´s wedding was registered. I left his house promising to search at home if among a bunch of documents and photos I had from my grandparents, I could eventually find a copy of this wedding certificate, or at least some other traces of it. To make the story short, we never found her wedding certificate, but the things I found out among those photos and documents at home, fascinated me and encouraged me to find my family tree and getting to know more about my ancestors to whom I owe a part of what I am now. I never got an Italian passport but, because of that search I started then, I ended up getting the Spanish citizenship as per my grandfather on the side of my father (until the moment I´ve found the original documents my father wasn´t aware of the fact he was registered as the son of a Spanish man, but this is part of another story…)

How to find your family tree nowadays?

• Since I did my first steps in family tree construction, we have come to a long way technologically speaking, and specifically in what has to do with information management, and the way data might be gathered, organized and offered to the public.
• Birth, death, wedding certificates and baptism faiths, have always been a great source of reliable information on our ancestors, because they have complete names, precise dates and places, and because they do always enchain at least other four relatives or even more if we consider that some of these documents do also include witnesses. But sometimes they are not easy to get or might even get lost, as it happened to me. Some other times, we are unable to get them because we do not know our ancestors exact names, or last names might have minimum changes over the years that could complicate our search. I heard about people checking on old family tombs for names, birth and death dates…in the internet things are much simpler.

How can ancestry.com help you to find your family tree?

You either might be trying to get any of those certificates and are lacking exact names and other relevant data, or you might just be trying to find out who your relatives are, know more about your origins and challenge yourself to see how far back you can go: now you can get extraordinary help from internet sites like ancestry.com

• Online family trees like the ones offered by ancestry.com are searchable family databases, displayed as family group records. They are trustable because data has been supplied by individuals and organizations throughout the world interested in the subject and contain many generations of a lineage and include valuable dates.
• Just follow the link http://trees.ancestry.com/ and get connected with your family story : ancestry.com makes easier the part of manual work you have to do when making your family tree, as your name is all that it takes to start it. The more you add, the better ancestry.com can help you.
• Ancestry.com does also provide you with interesting information about the meaning of surnames.
• You will find that ancestry.com is so user friendly that you do not even need to know about “computers” to use it.
• Leafs get displayed in a very ludic way: you will feel you are in some sort of treasury hunt, and at the end of the way you will get something precious: the story of your family that is the story of you.

By, Carmen Vazquez Sibils

Beginner Tips for those just starting out. As I was in the process of setting up my web page, My Family History – Genealogy I was able to pull together some thoughts as to what I would say on the “tips” page for beginner genealogists or those that have been at it for a while like myself can relate to what I am saying here. I have now being at this genealogy “kick” or hobby for about 38 years now according to my recollection. I recall my interest was first tweaked with Alex Hailey’s televised miniseries “Roots”, although I think even before I watched this TV show I had an interest in genealogy and my family’s history. I remember growing up and listening to my grandparents telling stories of when they were my age. Although I do think this is a basic human need to know and understand where we came from so maybe we can understand as to where we are going. When I started four decades ago, we did not have anything like the internet. I did not have instant access to census records, vital stats indexes, immigration records, military records or voter lists. Everything had to be done manually by hand, looking through reels and reels of microfilm for one bit of information. Then to establish one date I had to write to the archives or vital stats office for that particular country, county or state I was doing my search in. This would take weeks and weeks just to get one certificate and if it was wrong then you had to do the process all over again. This was very time consuming and a costly procedure. The only resources I had at my disposal was the public library and the Church of Latter Day Saints research centers. They had microfiche indexes with alphabetical name cross references for Great Britain parish records and vital statistics births/marriages/deaths/ but you had to establish where your ancestors were from or otherwise it was a shot in the dark.

So I am getting ahead of myself here. The first step of the Genealogical research has not changed. That is before you get to the point of looking into vital statistics, parish records, census returns etc., you need to do some information gathering. Whether this is writing down oral stories from your parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings, and cousins, finding out if they have any old documentation like birth/marriage/death certificates or letters and old photos etc. You can search your family tree online to see if some other relative has started a research as this can save you a lot of time and money. Myself I found other family members online that had already done their own research. Ask each relative about specific family members, gather information about what they tell you about where they lived, what occupation and job(s) they had where they were born/married and died. Any other important clues like if they went by a nick name etc. is all important. Maybe there is an old scrap book, photo album or bible that is laying around somewhere as these can hold valuable information.

A video recorder comes in handy when talking to granddad. I did this with my father a few years ago and had him reminisce old family stories. He has been gone now for a couple of years but I still can reflect with him on video. When I started all those years ago I did not have the conveniences of video equipment but had an old cassette tape recorder. This I used when I interviewed my elderly great aunt in 1979. I got a couple of hours of her reminiscing of tales of her youth. I then put it into a transcript and used it to compile the Davis family story in my Aunts own words. She has being dead now for 35 years but she is still alive in her words for us today that we can read and enjoy what she had to say. Oral traditions and family stories are not always 100% accurate but it is a start and in my experience that what family stories I read or heard seem to be confirmed when I started to look into the vital records.

After you have done this you can start to put together a family tree by first starting with yourself and working backwards in time. There are a number of good family tree software programs out there and a number of web sites that have family tree builders in them. I will get into some of these web sites later.

This will be ongoing information resource that I will be adding to weekly. I am also going to do a write up on restoring old photographs as I have had some experience myself with this over the year. I had the long tedious task of scanning my mother’s photo album and cataloging the pictures. On my parents 60th wedding anniversary I was able to put together a DVD for them.

Any question or suggestion please write to me here or post to my Facebook page and I will get back to you.

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