last names i get some like smiths and cooks and bakers are from past careers and some other like Harris son to get Harrison but when did we get to choose our last name … i mean you had no choice nor did many generations before you but somewhere look in any phone book and well someone chose that name so when did it happen and why … yes Ellis island caused some immigrants to chose a last name but most didn’t speak English so where did all the surnames come from but really all the names ever no way… i know women use their husband’s name and some people change it but I mean for men when did all the names come from?
I doubt that people chose their own last names terribly often. There was a time in history when people didn’t use more than a handful of first names. There were 10 Richards in a medieval village with a fairly small population, so people referred to the as Richard + descriptor. The descriptors were anything that might be acquired in the same way nicknames are acquired now. If you were “Richard, John’s son.” You probably acquired it in school, when you didn’t have much else to distinguish you. If you were one of a couple of families who lived up on a hill, you might be Richard hill, and if you had very dark hair, particularly as a small child, when Caucasian people tend to have lighter hair, you might be Richard black, or if you were tall, Richard long. Frequently, families shared a trait, whether it was “long,” “hill,” or “crookshanks,” so it made sense that whole families shared a nickname, even if occasionally a person didn’t fit the descriptor.
FWIW, I knew a guy in the military who was in the same unit as his father, and so everyone referred to him as “Nick’s son.” People new to the unit, until it was explained to them, thought his actual name was “Nixon,” and wondered why his nametag said something else.
There have been specific instances of people being forced to choose lastnames for bureaucratic reasons: government structures put in place by foreigners who had lastnames would require lastnames and that they be transmitted from parent(s) to child, locals who had never felt the need for such a thing would have to pick them. This is for example what happened with Sikhs under British dominion.
But in most cases, it works as Rivkah Chaya said.
That kind of processes would even occasionally lead people to change lastnames: someone might have been known in Potatoville as “Joe Smith” (grandson of Robert Smith, son of Robert Smith and younger brother of Robert Smith), being from a long line of smiths, but move to Beerville (Potatoville wasn’t big enough for two smithies) and become known there as Joe Potatoville. And his children, and their children, would be the Potatovilles as well.
A friend of mine has the lastname Torres, which is pretty common. In her father’s home village, she’s known as la renca, she-pegleg, being the eldest daughter of the eldest son of the eldest son of the eldest son of a man who lost a foot in the Cuban war. He eldest daughter is already known as la renquita, little she-pegleg, and the family is collectively known as los rencos, the peglegs, to differentiate them from every other Torres family in the village and surrounding villages. If g-g-g-g-grandpa had happened to lose that foot a few centuries earlier, the family’s lastname would be Renco now.
In Scandinavian countries, the most common forms of last names are patronyms and farm (or other location) names.
The sons of Anders have last name Anderson, daughters Andersdatter. When coming to the US it’s an odd situation. So the last name doesn’t stick around from each generation (except by accident: Lars Larsen type names). A young person traveling alone might keep their patronym (and for women the datter replaced by son, which is odd). But young kids traveling with their parents get assigned their father’s patronym rather than their own. So I’ve seen siblings with different last names based on how they got here.
Since there’s a lot of duplicates from this, farm names were often added. Someone from Bruns farm might go by Brunsgaard. I’ve seen people go thru 3 different farm names as they moved around, but usually stuck with their birth farm name when coming to the US.
In either case, last names weren’t considered a fixed value until the early 1900s (and still not in Iceland) or until emigrating.
In a country like England, surnames come from a huge variety of sources. Trades of course, and location too - although you then wonder how that Village got its name.We’ve had Vikings, Normans (Vikings in disguise), Danes, Saxons - you name it - people have been moving in for centuries and bringing names and customs with them.
As said above - if you live in a village of 200 people, names are no great problem and the ‘son’ suffix is going to be common. Often the serfs would take their name from the local Lord - even if he was no relation, just as slaves did in the Caribbean.
Bureaucracy gradually demanded that everyone should have a different name to distinguish them from all the other Roberts and Johns, and in many cases I am sure that surnames would have been allocated arbitrarily by some census taker or tax collector.
I recall an interview with a fellow named John MacDonald from - I think - Cape Breton, north end of Nova Scotia. He mentioned that there were umpteen people named “John MacDonald” and so each acquired a nickname. “Silver” john MacDonald had greyish hair. One visited Boston one time and was from then on known as “Yankee” John MacDonald. So much like Nava’s example, if this had been the situation centuries ago before surnames were formalized, that nickname may have stuck as the identifying name for the rest of their offspring.
OTOH, I dig into my past and the parish register for that area of rural England is extremely spotty between 1530’s and 1660’s - but the surname is still traceable, albeit with “Y” for “I” in some instances. So the idea of family names, even for the peons, seems to have solidified well before that. Spelling was not their strong suite - and the final “S” magically appears in the late 1700s (sort of like the difference between “Richard” and “Richards”.)
A friend of my brother’s is from Bulgaria. She’s got a patronymic and a family name, but a bureaucratic confusion led to her Spanish records having the patronymic as “first lastname” and the family name as “second lastname”.
I hear her dad is furious that her kids have inherited that patronymic (which for those kids is completely wrong anyway) as their own “second lastname”.
I think last names start to “stick” when you start needing to put down a family name on official paperwork, and in particular when you need to register births (an adult can put down an acquired last name, but a baby doesn’t have anything else to use besides a name used by their parents.)
This is going to vary by community.
As was already said, most folks didn’t choose their names. You had things like John the Cooper (barrel maker), and his son Dave, who became Dave the Cooper’s Son or Dave Cooperson. Or maybe Dave went into the family business, as many folks did back then, and just became Dave Cooper. Over time these nicknames used to describe people became their family names. Some were based on their occupations. Others were based on physical traits (Strong, Tall, etc). Some were based on where they lived. Leonardo da Vinci was this guy named Leonardo from a place called Vinci (da just means of or from).
My own name comes from an ancient Greek word meaning strong. When my grandfather got to Ellis Island, the immigration folks decided it started with a few too many consonants for Americans to pronounce, and they simplified it. A lot of foreign names got altered this way, especially the longer names. A Greek name like Papadapoulas might get shorted to Pappas, for example. A lot of foreign names in the U.S. are shortened or Americanized versions of foreign things that, again, meant something like the person’s profession or where they were from or something similar.
Sometimes when coming to America, families would change their names to hide their ethnic background to avoid discrimination based on their ethnicity.
One of the few groups that got to choose their last names was the freed slaves after the Civil War. Some kep the names of the white family that had owned them. Others changed their names to the names of prominent men like Washington and Jefferson. As blacks fought for civil rights in the 1960s, many whose families had kept their white names now changed their names to shed their “slave names”. Many blacks converted to the Islamic faith and changed their names to reflect their new religion. So Cassius Clay famously became Mohammad Ali. In many cases they were both shedding their slave ancestry and affirming their new religion simultaneously.
A documentary on how these things were decided.
my last name is possibly one of those, from what I’ve read it basically means “From Zaręby,” probably Zaręby Kościelne. It’s trickier because it has a few possible forms in English thanks to its Polish spelling and pronunciation.
“Czech,” the Polish spelling of someone from the Český Republic. Is a common last name-- in Poland. These are people who have lived in Poland for generations and consider themselves Polish, but obviously originally came from Bohemia or Moravia, the Česk speaking regions of what is now the Český Republic.
Last names seemed to start to represent whole families, and to “stick” so to speak, around the time of public education for the masses. This was when children started needing two names that would follow them around after their schooling. Also, one thing the Renaissance had over the middle ages was mobility-- there was a lot of movement into the cities, and literacy of the middle classes, and even something like 20% literacy among even the very lowest classes, led to to things: job references, and letters of introduction. You needed a place to stay in London when you first got their, and your good friend knew of someone who had a spare bedroom, or maybe just a spare couch, and would write a letter introducing you to this person in London, who would help you out. You could also get a job with a reference from your last job. This was new, with people moving away from the towns where they grew up. Boys even showed up in towns seeking apprenticeships with letters from their schoolmasters saying they were quick students, and diligent workers.
In Spain, family lastnames started sticking around more or less around the 10th century (varies by area, take into account that back then the place was a bunch of different domains and kingdoms), and it was indeed linked to public records. Not so much births and deaths (which at that time were recorded by the corresponding religious authorities, if at all), but things like records of going to Parliament, land ownership, privileges granted to someone on account of doing a specific job or living in a specific place… (“the family that lives in Queensbridge, in the house with the black eaves right beside the bridge, shall not pay duties at any of the royal bridge tolls in our kingdom, in exchange for keeping the bridge in Queensbridge clean and clear”). Most people were illiterate; Navarre’s first compilation of laws is from the 13th century but before that special laws and Parliament records were both in writing.
This is almost certainly a family myth. The immigration folks at Ellis Island almost never changed names; they couldn’t, because they weren’t writing down the names in the first place. The inspectors at Ellis Island received a list (passenger manifest) from the shipping company, and they checked the names off the list as they verified each person’s presence and eligibility to enter the U.S.
Very occasionally, an immigrant would complain that the clerk who sold them the ticket at the port of embarkation wrote down the name incorrectly, and you’ll find notations in the manifests where an inspector noted this, but the original name is never scratched out completely, and can still be seen in the digital images of the ship’s manifests, available through several websites. A shortened family name means either (1) the name was shortened in Europe (the family changed their name in anticipation of the move, or they bought their ticket in a port far from home where nobody spoke their language), or (2) the name was changed after their arrival, perhaps to fit in better in their new home.
The closest thing to it is when manifests were in another alphabet. The transliteration by one interpreter might not be the same as the transliteration of another, so members of a family who came over at different times might get different spellings.
Also, I did read somewhere that occasionally very common names in another country might have an accepted abbreviation, like we might abbreviate William Wm. or Charles Chas. If Pappadapoulous (and I’m making this up to have an example; I don’t know) is a very common Greek name that is common enough to have the abbreviation Pappas., but Americans don’t know this, then some people coming over might get the abbreviation as their official name, and, not wanting to rock the boat, so to speak (no one wanted to make themselves stand out, for fear of getting sent back), just accepted it.
Now, it is true that lots of immigrants changed their own names after getting through Ellis Island. If they got sick of their name being mispronounced, they may have changed to a spelling that reflected the pronunciation in the way an American would understand; many Jews altered their names to sound less Jewish, and some Italians and E. Europeans took more Anglo-sounding names. People got rid of diacritical marks, and either added letter to make up for them, or put up with the way Americans pronounced them without the diacritical marks. Some people translated their names into English.
But lots of people did change their names when they came over. Maybe they were self-conscious about it, and needed to blame the bureaucracy, and that’s where the Ellis Island excuse came from.
It may not have been the folks at Ellis Island, but the name was definitely changed by someone. I have the original Greek spelling of my grandfather and grandmother’s names from a newspaper clipping. My grandfather opened a restaurant, and there’s an old picture in a Greek newspaper from the village that my grandmother was from with a picture of my grandfather, grandmother, father, and uncle, with the original Greek spelling of my grandfather’s name, my grandmother’s maiden name, the villages where both of them were from, and my father and uncle’s original Greek names. The picture was taken in the restaurant was apparently newsworthy in the small Greek village they were from.
We have a copy of the ship manifest, a copy of the immigration form that my grandfather filled out, and a line on a census with his name from about 9 years after he arrived. All three versions of the name are spelled differently and none of them completely match the family’s current spelling of the name. The ship manifest version is the closest to the original Greek.
Often it’s the same kind of situation as with my brother’s Bulgarian friend (who didn’t know at the time that her children would inherit whatever she put down in “first lastname”), or my situation when filling up American paperwork.
Name fake but structure true.
Name in official Spanish records (Civil registry, Policía Nacional computers -> DNI and passport, Tráfico computers -> driver’s license): María de los Milagros Sáez de Pisuerga Arana.
Called Mila. Always Mila.
Printed on DNI and passport as name, María Milagros; first lastname Sáez de Pisuerga; second lastname Arana.
Printed on driver’s license as name, Ma de los Milagros; first lastname Saez de Pisuerga; second lastname Arana.
Ends up in American records as first name María, middle initial M, lastname Saez de Pisuerga, and I almost lost the “de Pisuerga”. List of “aliases” on record with the US government includes Ma de los Milagros Saez de Pisuerga Arana, Mila Sáez de Pisuerga Arana, Mila Saez de Pisuerga Arana… María García, because every Hispanic woman is María García don’tchaknow… and even that time an idiot at the library copied Mila Saez de Pisuerga as Maya Putscha. Was that library page trying to fuck up my name? No, but apparently she was illiterate. Were the Americans involved in creating my SS card and other US documents trying to screw up my name? No, but María de los Milagros isn’t something they’re used to dealing with.