My title may seem a bit cryptic, but I couldn’t think of a short way to state it.
I live in St. Mary’s County in Maryland. It’s a primarily rural area with lots of Amish and one big Naval Air Station. I’ve lived here for 12 years, and I suspect that except for those who come and go at NAS Pax, most people around here are life-long residents, or a least a large plurality are.
And there are names that seem to suggest large local families. For example: Guy. We get our cars serviced at Guy Motors. There’s an accountant named Guy, and a tractor/farm equipment dealer, a septic company, an excavation company. I even worked with a Guy before I retired. If I wanted to bore you, I could probably list a dozen others based on street names and businesses.
Do you live in an area where certain names seem to suggest deep roots? Can your family be tied to such a place by its name?
Just a mundane, pointless musing on a Sunday morning…
I’ve been reading a locally-published book called “Slovaks in Cleveland and Lakewood [Ohio]” and the book does a lot of listing names of the Slovak and Czech people involved in whatever story is being told. I am somewhat surprised at how many of the surnames of these early immigrants (well early like the 1890s) are the same surnames of many people I know or have at least heard of.
In my area in Wisconsin, dutch surnames are tied to the early settlement of the county. And many of the roads are named after early settlers too. I can pull out of my driveway and go for 10 miles on 5 different roads and still be on a road named with one of my family surnames. Including my own. (14 miles and 6 roads if I include my great-great grandma’s 2nd husband’s surname).
Many local businesses bear the dutch surnames of their founders, often going back over a century.
hmmm locally, Peterson, Dillon, Miller, Wolf, Minegar, Munster, Evans and Andrus are the ones that come to mind.
My surname used to only take up about 5 spots in the phone book when I was a kid and they were all my family. Last time I looked there was almost two pages and none of them were my family (we all have unlisted/cell phone numbers)
If your lastname is Les, you’re probably from Valtierra but might be from Arguedas. If your lastname is Samanes, you’re probably from Arguedas but might be from Valtierra. If your lastnames are Samanes Samanes, Samanes Les, Les Samanes or Les Les, you reeeeeeally want to go further away than “the next village” in search of a spouse.
The most frequent lastname of evident Basque origin is Ochoa. Spanish lastnames in the form “Commonlastname” (patronymic or Ochoa) “de” (from) “Place” generally originate in the area of Navarre, Álava, Guipúzcoa, Rioja or northern Burgos, where they’re frequent enough that people don’t bat an eye; they’re quite uncommon otherwise.
That same area produces a lot of toponymic lastnames (Álava, Arana, Ugarte or Huarte, Osés, Oyón… you can just grab the local phonebook and a map and start checking); also, many toponymics which were born in Latin America happen to refer to that area. If your colony had three dudes called Ochoa, two López and six Garcías, they were very likely to end up being called by their place of birth, trading their old and very common family name for one that wouldn’t lead to confusion.
The ending -buru (head, top) is relatively common in lastnames of Basque origin.
A quarter of people in New Hampshire are of French decent (French-Canadian, specifically) so there are lots of French surnames: Gagnon, Dube, Poulin, Dion, Gauthier, Bouchard, Pelletier, Lavoie, Levesque, Cloutier, Bedard, Proulx, Thibault etc.
I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is melting pot of people from all over the world. So no one region dominates. Our neighborhood is largely Asian, however, so there are many Chinese, Vietnamese, and Indian names. ETA: Also a lot of Filipinos.
Many of the common surnames of the Cayman Islands can be traced back to the earliest settlers. Bodden, Kirkconnell, Ebanks, Watler, Tibbetts, Whittaker and Parchment are quite common family names.
I grew up in northern New York where French names were common due to the proximity with Quebec. Names like Dubrey, Frenyea, Gonyea, LaCroix, Rabideau, and Riel were common.
No such thing around me. My last name ends in -ski. Lots of European-ethnic surnames. Growing up in Chicago just about everyone’s surname was either Italian, Polish, Greek, German, Irish, Jewish…
My sister lives downstate near St Louis, and once commented on how odd it seemed to her that all of the surnames were so Anglo - Johnson, Smith, Lynch, etc. with only a few German surnames in the bunch.
My current suburb seems to have a strong German heritage, evidenced mainly via some street/place names, and on tombstones in the local cemetary.
Oddly enough, my own. It was fairly rare in California, although known to the public because of a couple of low-end celebrities. Here in the Greater-Greater New York area, it’s almost common. There are two unrelated Barbarians in our small-town high school, and a couple of popular/famous brands. It’s kind of weird to see my name everywhere…
Of course, most of my historical family is here, and my grandfather was the rogue who went to californee with a bow tie on his knee. Or something.
I mostly notice the names of the old-time families in our small town, who have been stamping the family monicker on things for 300 years.
Besides the ubiquitous Wisconsin Johnsons, the most common names in my home town were Vande Zande, Loomans and Landaal. When I first moved away a d livid on my own in another town, the most common names were Przybylski, Trzebiatowski and Niespdziani.
There’s a distinct set of slave names which run throughout Coloured culture - there are several groupings -
the date names (Januarie, Februarie, September etc…)
the Classic names (Titus, Cupido, Sylvester…)
the insulting/facetious ones (Witbooi, Fortuin, …),
the religious ones (Moses, Solomons) and
the lazy (Jansen, Pietersen, Abrahams, etc - all named after their owners in the possessive)
Amongst White and Coloured Capetonians, there’s another thread that shows French Huguenot ancestry: Du Toit, De Villiers, Du Plessis, Fransman etc.
My family name is tied to ancestry from St Helena, and also to a particular prominent hill in one suburb that shares our name.
My area was settled predominantly by the Finns, so we have tons of Finnish names. When I first moved back here with Mr. Athena (who is not from this area), we had a funny interaction.
Mr. Athena: “So I talked to the carpet cleaning guys, someone’s gonna call us back.”
Me: “oh, which one did you talk to?”
Mr. Athena: “Umm, I can’t remember his name. Something Scottish, here I wrote it down.”
Me, thinking “Scottish? wha?”
He hands me the paper. It has the name “John McKay” on it.
Me: laughing my ass off
Mr. Athena “What?”
Me: “McKay? Do you mean… Maki?”
Mr. Athena “…”
And yep, it was John Maki calling us back. Maki is more or less “Smith” in this area. After living in Colorado for 12 years and always dealing with hispanic names that I was really bad at, it was nice to be back in the lands where I understand and can spell the names (despite not having a drop of Finn in me at all).
But yeah, the most common names here tend to end in “i” or “innen” and have lots of multiple-as in them: Laakinnen, Saari, etc. A fair number of French-Canadian derived names too - Beaudry, LaFleur, Boudin, etc.
In my county, it’s Deal, Akins, Lanier, Brinson, White, Beasley, Hodges, Riggs, and Zetterower. I’m related to all of them, on my father’s side of the family.
In the county where I was born, it’s Miles, Deen, Carter, Cauley, Aycock, Gruber, and Morris. I’m related to all of those on my mother’s side.
All of my ancestors had arrived in Southeast Georgia no later than 1840, so I’m related to dam near everyone.
Growing up in northern Indiana, there was a mix of Amish/plain folk surnames like Metzger, Miller, Yoder, Bontrager, Troyer, Hochstetler and Stutzman. There were a lot of northern European names from Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and, most common, Germany. The migration from Appalachia brought a lot of folks with the names Allen, Prater, Shepherd, Owens, Bradford, Bays, Mullins and Collins.
Where I live now, once you get outside of the city, the names Cothron, Dillard, Goins and Oldham are pretty common.
