# My surname tells you almost nothing about my ancestry **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [July 16, 2018, 4:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-surname-tells-you-almost-nothing-about-my-ancestry/817986 "2018-07-16T04:03:04Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![CairoCarol](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cairocarol/32/3825_2.png) [@CairoCarol](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CairoCarol)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2018, 1:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-surname-tells-you-almost-nothing-about-my-ancestry/817986/21 "2018-07-17T01:14:32Z")
> [@snoe](#): > > So my surname ends up being actively misleading to lots of people who are making assumptions about my heritage. I’ve been in that situation too. I’m Caucasian but my surname is extremely common among African-Americans. I used to work at an organization that was largely African-American and did a lot of advocacy work related to racial bias in society. Whenever I had a meeting with someone external to the place that employed me, I could always see the amazement on their faces when they first saw me and realized I was white. ---
**Author:** ![Baker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/bb73d2/32.png) [@Baker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Baker)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2018, 2:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-surname-tells-you-almost-nothing-about-my-ancestry/817986/22 "2018-07-17T02:34:05Z")
> [@installLSC](#): > > Growing in a mostly Hispanic area, you’d be surprised at the number of blue eyed blond people with last names like Hernandez or Garcia. Sometimes it’s a name by marriage, and sometimes it’s not. For example, does this actress strike you as someone who has two Cuban parents? Yeah, I had a Mrs. Ortiz for Cost Accounting at college. She was six feet tall, blond and blue-eyed. Now, her husband was Hispanic, and that’s where she got the name. ---
**Author:** ![Grumbacher\_Red](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/85e7bf/32.png) [@Grumbacher\_Red](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grumbacher_Red)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2018, 2:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-surname-tells-you-almost-nothing-about-my-ancestry/817986/23 "2018-07-17T02:42:36Z")
> [@snoe](#): > > I don’t think there’s anything wrong with merely being curious about where someone’s name “comes from;” curiosity is only human, and can be satisfied without being disrespectful. On the other hand, there are less innocent reasons to want to be able to make a reliable guess about someone’s heritage/ethnicity from their surname. This is where I fall in my feelings on the subject. I think mostly people are just trying to be conversational, and they think this makes for a good ice breaker. They don’t always realize it might be a touchy subject for some. And yes, there are those with less innocent motives. I was married for 30 years and got divorced and decided to keep my married surname mostly because I have built my career with this name and it was too much of a hassle to change it, even though I don’t really like the sound of it and it is not indicative of my ancestry, either. I am always getting asked if I know so-and-so and have to explain this is not my maiden name. And speaking of that, my maiden name is actually my stepfather’s last name as he adopted me when I was 5, and it is the “wrong” ancestry also. At this point I just let my personality and my character do the talking and I don’t care so much about the surname. As to the OP, I would just say it is what it is, and I am who I am. ---
**Author:** ![Kent\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kent_clark/32/105_2.png) [@Kent\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kent_Clark)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2018, 3:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-surname-tells-you-almost-nothing-about-my-ancestry/817986/24 "2018-07-17T03:10:07Z")
> [@ftg](#): > > And there’s the Ellis Island effect where names got smushed into something more familiar sounding. Italian? Polish? Well you’ve got an English name now. > [@John\_Mace](#): > > That is [largely a myth.](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/ask-smithsonian-did-ellis-island-officials-really-change-names-immigrants-180961544/) > [@ftg](#): > > My g-grandfather left the old country with one last name and entered the US with a different one. With me, it’s all of the above. Family lore has it that my grandfather left the old country “in a hurry” and changed his name on the way over, and then immigration misspelled _that_ name. I don’t know if any of that is actually true, but it’s easier to say “that’s what we wound up with after we went through Ellis Island,” and the kind of people who ask in the first place always seem satisfied with that for an answer. ---
**Author:** ![thelurkinghorror](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7c8e57/32.png) [@thelurkinghorror](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thelurkinghorror)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2018, 4:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-surname-tells-you-almost-nothing-about-my-ancestry/817986/25 "2018-07-17T04:45:49Z")
My mother’s last name can serve as German or Irish. I don’t think she’s even sure of all that ancestry through her father. > [@installLSC](#): > > Growing in a mostly Hispanic area, you’d be surprised at the number of blue eyed blond people with last names like Hernandez or Garcia. Sometimes it’s a name by marriage, and sometimes it’s not. For example, does this actress strike you as someone who has two Cuban parents? Eh, Hispanic people can be brown, white, black, whatever. Argentina is probably whiter than Canada. > [@DavidwithanR](#): > > Speaking of Ellis Island and names and so on, if an Icelandic family moves to the US, are they permitted to continue to name their children in the Icelandic way? (e.g. if you’re a girl and your father’s name is Harald then your last name is Haraldsdottir, not your father’s last name) Mostly a WAG, but it’s probably okay. The US doesn’t care so much what your name is as long as it’s not chosen to commit a crime or avoid prosecution. ---
**Author:** ![DavidwithanR](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/3bc359/32.png) [@DavidwithanR](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DavidwithanR)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2018, 5:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-surname-tells-you-almost-nothing-about-my-ancestry/817986/26 "2018-07-17T05:33:45Z")
> [@Ashtura](#): > > Isn’t asking where someone comes from considered a microaggression? I think “considered” is not a useful term. But it can be taken that way, yes. Some do, some don’t. ---
**Author:** ![DavidwithanR](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/3bc359/32.png) [@DavidwithanR](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DavidwithanR)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2018, 5:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-surname-tells-you-almost-nothing-about-my-ancestry/817986/27 "2018-07-17T05:39:35Z")
> [@Broomstick](#): > > I’m willing to accept “It happened when we came through Ellis Island” as shorthand for “somewhere between the home village and where we wound up in the US someone for some reason decide to change either the spelling or the entire damn name at some point”. > > I have it on good authority that my father’s family _did not have_ surnames in the “old country” (they probably used either the construct “X son/daughter of Y” or the name of their village as an additional identifier when necessary, but it was neither legally nor formally a part of their name). Somewhere between there and here they acquired a surname. Actually, three of them for my paternal grandmother’s family as the siblings came over in three groups, after which they apparently had a meeting or something and all settled on one somewhere along the line. > > As Nava notes, those of us who did not have a “conventional” (meaning, conventional in the Anglosphere) name when we came over often DID find our names shoe-horned into a convention, truncated, added to, or otherwise altered. Thinking of the point you just made and the question I asked about Icelanders… I think the idea that there’s no “Ellis Island effect” is almost certainly erroneous. I don’t think it would be easy for a new immigrant with poor English skills to insist “Where I come from, there’s no such thing as a family name”, or to necessarily even know that it would matter for them to be insisting about this right now. ---
**Author:** ![Delicious](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/dbc845/32.png) [@Delicious](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Delicious)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2018, 8:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-surname-tells-you-almost-nothing-about-my-ancestry/817986/28 "2018-07-17T08:38:26Z")
It’s not just an American Immigrant thing, my surname is a messed up version of the original Irish (or Scottish, we’re not sure) name, it’s 4 letters long and spelt about 10 different ways. I think my grandparents were the first people in the family who could read & write so they just told the local priest/government official what their name was in a heavy accent and accepted whatever they wrote down. ---
**Author:** ![doreen](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/858c86/32.png) [@doreen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/doreen)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2018, 11:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-surname-tells-you-almost-nothing-about-my-ancestry/817986/29 "2018-07-17T11:37:33Z")
> [@Broomstick](#): > > I’m willing to accept “It happened when we came through Ellis Island” as shorthand for “somewhere between the home village and where we wound up in the US someone for some reason decide to change either the spelling or the entire damn name at some point”. Somebody somewhere along the way decided to change my mother’s family name. I don’t know who or where or when exactly, except that they left Sicily with one name and ended up with a different one. The only thing I’m sure of is that it wasn’t my great-grandparents who changed it - they were illiterate even in Italian and the “new” name is suspiciously close to how the sounds of the name would be spelled in English. ---
**Author:** ![IvoryTowerDenizen](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ivorytowerdenizen/32/17937_2.png) [@IvoryTowerDenizen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/IvoryTowerDenizen)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2018, 12:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-surname-tells-you-almost-nothing-about-my-ancestry/817986/30 "2018-07-17T12:01:32Z")
> [@DavidwithanR](#): > > Speaking of Ellis Island and names and so on, if an Icelandic family moves to the US, are they permitted to continue to name their children in the Icelandic way? (e.g. if you’re a girl and your father’s name is Harald then your last name is Haraldsdottir, not your father’s last name) No prohibition in the US in giving children last names different from the parents. My husband and I each have our birth last names and our kids have last names different from either of ours. My last name sounds squarely like a differently ethnicity than my own (like if my last name was “French” and I’m actually Polish). It’s also a translation of the word, so somewhat anglicized (think if my last name was Francaise changing it to French). So when people ask if I’m that nationality I just chuckle a bit and say “No, but I can see why you’d think that”. Saying “it’s American” can come off inadvertently dismissive, since people will presume you’re saying that to make some larger point. You could say it’s “uniquely” American, which puts a positive spin on it, eliminating any possible dismissiveness. ---
**Author:** ![ZipperJJ](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/zipperjj/32/211_2.png) [@ZipperJJ](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ZipperJJ)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2018, 2:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-surname-tells-you-almost-nothing-about-my-ancestry/817986/31 "2018-07-17T14:53:31Z")
Can’t you just say something like “Actually, the name is from Barbados. But my heritage is mostly German. How about that?!” I mean, you know where the name comes from. Its origin is even more interesting than “just Scottish”. Why not share that? ---
**Author:** ![Slow\_Moving\_Vehicle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slow_moving_vehicle/32/291_2.png) [@Slow\_Moving\_Vehicle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Slow_Moving_Vehicle)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2018, 8:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-surname-tells-you-almost-nothing-about-my-ancestry/817986/32 "2018-07-17T20:26:36Z")
> [@Nava](#): > > OK, and I immigrated to the US in 1994, lost two words in my firstname, the first word of my firstname was turned into my firstname, the fourth word of my firstname was turned into my middle name, and the only reason my lastname didn’t get chopped down to its first word (of three) or stuck with dashes (arrrrrrgh!) is that by that point I was already used to fighting for its integrity. Oh, and of course, the only way I could keep my second lastname was by adding yet-another-dash and stick it to the first lastname, hell no. > > It wasn’t through Ellis Island, I’ll give you that. Well sure. Us 'Muricans can handle a simple, obvious name like “Brzezinski” or “Grbac” or “O’Shaughnessy”. It’s those exotics like “Garcia” and “Hernandez” that throw us. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![susan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/susan/32/17537_2.png) [@susan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/susan)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2018, 8:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-surname-tells-you-almost-nothing-about-my-ancestry/817986/33 "2018-07-17T20:59:32Z")
So are you related to the Downtownskis? ---
**Author:** ![monstro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba9def/32.png) [@monstro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/monstro)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2018, 9:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-surname-tells-you-almost-nothing-about-my-ancestry/817986/34 "2018-07-17T21:57:42Z")
> [@Ashtura](#): > > Isn’t asking where someone comes from considered a microaggression? Personally, I have no problem with someone asking that question. But I want them to either accept my answer at face value or ask the question they really want to ask. If someone wants to know where my ancestral lineage is from, they need to ask directly and not assume they are going to get that information by asking “Where are you from?” ---
**Author:** ![thelurkinghorror](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7c8e57/32.png) [@thelurkinghorror](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thelurkinghorror)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2018, 10:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-surname-tells-you-almost-nothing-about-my-ancestry/817986/35 "2018-07-17T22:03:38Z")
“Where are you from?” “Cleveland.” “What about before that?” “Well, I was born in Pittsburgh, but moved at 1” “Where are your parents from?” “Pittsburgh also.” “NO REALLY, where are you from?” vs. “Where is your family originally from?” Both are asking about ethnic background, but the former is much more impolite about it. > [@Slow\_Moving\_Vehicle](#): > > Well sure. Us 'Muricans can handle a simple, obvious name like “Brzezinski” or “Grbac” or “O’Shaughnessy”. It’s those exotics like “Garcia” and “Hernandez” that throw us. 😃 O Shag Hennessy!? ---
**Author:** ![Tim\_R.Mortiss](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tim_r.mortiss/32/142_2.png) [@Tim\_R.Mortiss](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tim_R.Mortiss)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2018, 11:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-surname-tells-you-almost-nothing-about-my-ancestry/817986/36 "2018-07-17T23:23:47Z")
I recall the scene in Pulp Fiction where Bruce Willis tells a very Hispanic-looking lady that his name is Butch. (She had already given her long and mellifluous name and explained its meaning.) She says, “Butch? What does this mean, Butch?” His reply is: “I’m an American, lady. Our names don’t mean shit.” ---
**Author:** ![Lamoral](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lamoral/32/16078_2.png) [@Lamoral](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lamoral)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2018, 3:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-surname-tells-you-almost-nothing-about-my-ancestry/817986/37 "2018-07-18T03:17:59Z")
People usually assume my surname is English, but it’s actually an Anglicized version of a Greek name, so I get where the OP is coming from. ---
**Author:** ![Kent\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kent_clark/32/105_2.png) [@Kent\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kent_Clark)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2018, 3:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-surname-tells-you-almost-nothing-about-my-ancestry/817986/38 "2018-07-18T03:23:02Z")
> [@Ashtura](#): > > Isn’t asking where someone comes from considered a microaggression? Depends. In St. Louis, “Where did you go to high school?” is either a friendly attempt to establish common ground with someone you just met, or a sneaky manipulation to determine [the exact neighborhood you grew up, and your economic, social and probably religious status all at once.](https://www.riverfronttimes.com/media-archive/7642101.0.pdf) Of course, it falls apart if you didn’t grow up in St. Louis, but that means you’re an outsider and we have nothing to say to you. ---
**Author:** ![Mr\_Downtown](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/8e8cbc/32.png) [@Mr\_Downtown](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr_Downtown)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2018, 4:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-surname-tells-you-almost-nothing-about-my-ancestry/817986/39 "2018-07-18T04:42:07Z")
> [@ZipperJJ](#): > > Can’t you just say something like “Actually, the name is from Barbados. But my heritage is mostly German. How about that?!” > > I mean, you know where the name comes from. Its origin is even more interesting than “just Scottish”. Why not share that? Well, I think the main issue is that it represents such a tiny percentage of my heritage. Were I able to complete a 10-generation pedigree chart, I’d probably be something like 330/1024ths Scottish, and 64/1024ths German, with a bunch of Welsh and English and other things thrown in there as well. I have no forebears at all who came to this country in the last **150 years.** And I think the most interesting thing about the name is that it’s now mostly held by African-Americans. But how that happened is not really where I want the discussion to go. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2018, 12:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-surname-tells-you-almost-nothing-about-my-ancestry/817986/40 "2018-07-18T12:57:28Z")
> [@Ashtura](#): > > Isn’t asking where someone comes from considered a microaggression? Depends on the location, on how it’s asked and on how often the person gets asked it. In the bilingual areas of Spain it’s a discrete way to ask which languages do you speak and which way you swing with regards to some word usages and spellings, which in turn is linked to that dreaded monster, Politics. The question is normally framed along the lines of “I don’t recall seeing you around before, are you originally from this town?” rather than “that’s a funny [accent/name] you have! Where are you from?” [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-surname-tells-you-almost-nothing-about-my-ancestry/817986.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-surname-tells-you-almost-nothing-about-my-ancestry/817986.md?page=3)