Are new surnames still being invented?

[Shade]

*Originally posted by t-bonham@scc.net *
**Yes, there is something special about “Smith”. It’s very frequent in western surnames because it comes from occupation(s) that were extremely common in the culture.

Every village in the middle ages had their blacksmith; it was a very neccessary occupation. (It produced both the Black and Smith surnames.) Larger towns also would have had whitesmiths (tin smiths, menders of pots & pans) And one source of the White & more Smith surnames). Also goldsmiths and silversmiths in larger towns.

So Smith, generically applied to any kind of metal-worker, was one of the most common occupations at the time surnames were being widely adopted. **

I did say ‘maybe’. I think ‘extremely common in the culture’ is misleading - surely farmers were more common than blacksmiths, but because there were too many of them, it wasn’t used as a surname?

*Originally posted by t-bonham@scc.net *The equivalent of “Smith” is the commonest surname in some European nationalities.

OK, there’s some actual evidence that it isn’t coincidence. Thanks, slipster.

[sailor]

The Spanish word for blacksmith is Herrero and is also a not uncommon surname as are other occupations: tejedor, ovejero, etc.

[Tim_T-Bonham.net]

*Originally posted by Shade *
surely farmers were more common than blacksmiths, but because there were too many of them, it wasn’t used as a surname?

Quite right, I think. There was probably only 1 blacksmith in the average village, but dozens of farmers.

So a name like “Farmer” was not very distinctive (but it’s still around as a surname). Many farmers eventually ended up with surnames that were somehow related to where they farmed. So you have surnames like Fields, Littlefield, Oldfield, Winfield, etc. Also Dell, Rivers, Glen, Marsh, Woods, etc. And any surname with a direction in it is likely to be from some ancestor who farmed in that direction from the village: North, Northland, Easton, Westwood, Weston, Southerly, etc. Then there are the surnames from the crop that farmer grew: Barley, Barleycorn, Millet, Wheaton, etc.

So there are probably a whole lot of surnames around for people who were farmers!

[Schnitte]

The German word for farmer, Bauer (you’ll see Baur a lot, too) is very common. I guess it comes from peasants who migrated to cities. In a village, it indeed would not make much sense to use the term as a surname, because there were so many, but city folk might call their new neighbor coming from rural regions “farmer.”

[even_sven]

Just a WAG, but surnames were probably more of a town thing than a country thing. As a farmer, you might be the only Bob for miles around, but in town you’d need to be distinguished from Bob the Barker, Bob the Smith and Bob the Streetsweeper.

[Acsenray]

As a farmer, you might be the only Bob for miles around

I wouldn’t make this assumption. There was a time in England, when most men shared a very small number of given names. There are records of families giving all their sons the same name, Robert, for example. That’s what prompted the creation of a range of diminutives – Rob, Bob, Dob, Hob, Nob, Robin, Bobby, Dobkin, etc.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

H. Allen Smith wrote People Named Smith (1950) about his much-copied surname.

Some excerpts can be found on this page.

Only the most ignorant of all the inhabitants of this planet (possibly a Smith) needs to be told that we excel in numbers. Our lead is so commanding, our procreative instincts so sharply developed, that it is unlikely that any of the other family groups will ever catch up to us. There have been times in the past when the Johnsons or the Browns or the Millers or the Joneses have taken to their mattresses and tried to make a fight of it, … but in the end they faded and gave up.

We, the Smiths, are far and away the largest family group in the United States. We hold an easy lead, too, in the British Isles. The Smiths are predominant in England, and it is a fact that in Scotland there are many more Smiths than there are MacDonalds. In some sections of Scotland one out of every fifty persons is named Smith. Please keep in mind that we are dealing here with straight-away Smiths - people having the name Ess-Em-Eye-Tee-Aitch. Not Smythe, or Schmidt, or Smitt, or Smid, or Smed, or Kovacs, or Kowalski, or Gowan, or Taliaferro, or Haddad, or all the multitude of other versions and variations of the name. p15.