A Columbian reader asks about the origin of surnames. Is it true, he asks, that sometime in the middle ages Europeans started using last names based on their occupation or where they lived? If so, when did this happen?

Names are important. They are our identity. Our surnames are our way of distinguishing one person from another. There is even a scientific field, etymology, that studies names. When I go to an Internet search engine and enter the terms "etymology" and "surnames", I can find a number of dictionaries of names.

When I’m faced with a question about surnames, I go to Family Names, a book by J. N. Hook. Dr. Hook usually has the answer. He says that the process of acquiring surnames occurred during medieval times, but it did not occur at any particular date. It was a gradual process, and the development was traced by analyzing tax rolls, court records, and other surviving documents for those times.

Before the fourteenth century, people were referred to as "son of" or "from" a certain place. For instance, there is John at the water, or John from the mills, or John son of Gilbert. Later these names became John Atwater and John Mills and John Gilbertson.

A person could change their name during their lifetime. For instance, John the Red might become John the Bald. Names wouldn’t necessarily pass from father to son. Surnames were a fleeting matter.

Dr. Hook cites a study of the most common American surnames and comes up with these statistics: 43 percent of them are place names, 32 percent are patronymics, 15 percent are occupational names, and 10 percent are descriptive nicknames.
A patronymic is the system of naming a person after their parent. Johnson is a typical example. For descriptive nicknames, one only needs to look at the telephone book to see Black and Brown and Duff and all of the other words that describe hair and skin coloring.

There are a number of books at the public library in the category of "names, personal." On a cool fall evening, a trip to the library to look at one of these would be entertaining. One of them may tell you what your name means.

© 2006

Connie Lenzen, CG