A name tells us more about our family history than anything else we possess!īy tracing your family name to its origin, you can uncover a wealth of information including royalty in your family, nobility, warriors, and any other persons of note! But more than simply a label, a name tells a greater story – it specifies the region, country, beliefs, and values of our forefathers. It is an identifier, used as a constant in our everyday lives. The single heirloom we all carry with us is our last name. The memories of parents, grandparents or even great grandparents cannot recall these first ancestors. Surnames or family names reach centuries into our history, back to our forefathers long departed. These descriptors often developed into fixed clan identifications that in turn became family names as we know them today.

These terms may indicate personal attributes, location of origin, occupation, parentage, patronage, adoption, or clan affiliation. Many cultures have used additional descriptive terms in identifying individuals. When a person is born, the custom is for them to take the first surname of the father, followed by the first surname of the mother. Parents’ names are essentially a child’s identity in Spanish and Latino cultures everyone has a double surname by law, although they are written without a hyphen and most people use only their first surname in everyday use. It became standard from the 16th century onward for a woman to take her husband’s name after marriage. Most every culture that formerly used patronyms switched to the more widespread style of passing just the father’s last name to the children (and wife). Moreover, the modern spelling variations of a surname are usually related to the phonetic spelling of that name, which was developed during the 17th or 18th century. Some early Norman nobles in England chose to drop the French derivations and title themselves instead after their new English holdings. In medieval times in France, such a name indicated lordship of the village. This is what is known as a territorial surname, a consequence of feudal landownership. Some of the early Norman nobility who arrived in England during the Norman conquest differentiated themselves by affixing ‘de’ (of) before the name of their village in France. Evidence indicates that surnames were first adopted among the feudal nobility and gentry, before slowly spreading to other parts of society. In England, the introduction of family names is generally attributed to the preparation of the Domesday Book in 1086, following the Norman conquest. Over the centuries, names were altered to make it easier for immigrants to spell their names upon arrival to their new country. In the 11th and 12th centuries, it was common practice to Latinize names in official records. Surnames rarely appeared in their modern form in ancient chronicles. The practice of using family names spread through the Eastern Roman Empire and gradually into Western Europe, although it was not until the modern era that family names came to be explicitly inherited as they are today.

Surname origin