When I was in high school, I knew a girl with this last name. I randomly tried to google the meaning of this name tonight, but nothing came up at all except for generic genealogy websites with no information–like those pages that only exist because they generate themselves based on a search, but contain zero actual data.
I remember this girl and her sister were kind of swarthy (not fat at all, but built in a very non-petite fashion), very pale, but with black hair and dark brown eyes. Their family was totally Americanized though, they were just normal girls with a weird last name.
As a very broad rule, when a name ends in “key” or “ky” it’s a corruption of the German “ke” or similar endings such as “tje” or “kew” from points further east. And when a name begins with “sw” it’s a corruption of the German “Schw”. Of course there are “English” names that end with “key” and even more start with “sw”, but they are rare relative to German derivatives.
In this case, it’s a safe bet that the name is a corruption of Schwetke/Schwetje, which is reasonably common in German speaking parts. “Schwetke” is pronounced roughly as “ShvEttkee” or “ShwEttkuh”, so it’s easy to see how it would be corrupted to “Swetkey” by English speakers, for whom the “Shv” sound is often difficult.
I have no idea what “Schwetke” means, but if you start another thread do ask the Mods to modify the title of this one, one of our German-ish dopers will probably be able to tell you.
ETA: It’s also worth noting that many German descendants deliberately altered the pronunciation and spelling of their names during the world wars, for obvious reasons.
Thanks a lot, Blake! Your analysis was very helpful. There were a lot of people with German heritage where I grew up (present company included), so that makes sense. They pronounced it like “sweat key,” so the sh sound was even gone from the phoneme.
:eek: No way! I’m embarrassed now, I’ve been using that word wrong my whole life. I thought it was a synonym for stocky. In this case, I meant a broad who’s short and… broad.
“Swetskey” is a reasonable English rendition of Russian tsvetski, meaning “flowers”. There are similar forms in Bulgarian and Macedonian. It could be a surname cognate to Flowers, Bloom, Flores, Fiore, Lafleur, etc.