Does anyone know the origin of this name? Google doesn’t bring up any results on a search.
It is clearly Scandanavian.
Possibly Swedish.
More than that, I cannot say.
From HERE explains GAARD. These names often indicated the place of residence of the family. For this reason, Denmark and Norway have a very high incidence of names derived from those of farms, many signified by the suffix -gaard – the modern spelling is gård in Danish and has changed to gard in Norwegian, but as in Sweden, archaic spelling persists in surnames.
From HERE explains ALLEN. Definition: From “aluinn,” meaning fair or handsome.
Surname Origin: Scottish Alternate Surname Spellings: ALAN, ALLAN More Resources for the Surname ALLEN.
So, is it Handsome from the Farms?
“Handsome from the Farms”?
Well, now.
If anybody on the SDMB wants to become a Gay Swedish Pornstar, I guess they know what to call themselves.
No offence is ment to any real Allengaards, or for that matter, any Gay Swedish Pornstars.
Are you quite certain that you’ve spelled the name correctly? With this spelling, it would have to be a mixture of Scottish and Swedish names. Nothing comes up in various searches, which is quite odd. Where did you hear this name?
Thanks for the info. A combination name from two different languages definitely is odd. The name was in an old family Bible (the section in the front where you record the names of family members and important dates). The way I spelled it is the way it is recorded, but I can’t be sure that the person doing the record keeping spelled it correctly. The info was probably recorded in Georgia or South Carolina, or some other place in the south. I don’t have the book with me, so I can’t give any info on the dates that they lived right now. No one in the family that I know is currently using the name. My family members are black, so we can’t use our ancestry to determine the source.
Quite possible that there was a name change, or slight variation of spelling when your family members migrated to this country. It happened to my family.
Didn’t the Norse invade northern England and Scotland? Could this be the reason for the mixing of languages?
As someone with a first name which combines two languages, and a surname which combines another two (all of British & Irish origin), I find this a perplexing statement!
Danish, actually. Swedish wouldn’t use “aa” but “å” instead.
“Gård” can indeed mean “farm”, but also “yard” as in farmyard, castleyard and so forth. The meaning of “farm” is relatively recent, having come via the word “bondgård”, farmer’s gård. The word comes from the word gardr, meaning enclosure.
“Allan” is not an uncommon first name, so I guess that’s the explanation: It means Allan’s yard. I bet it’s a Danish name.
Having said that, I’ve never heard the name; not that that means anything.
I’ll amend the statement to say that a last name from those two languages seemed odd. A mix of British and Irish origin doesn’t seem unlikely, but Scottish and Swedish sounded like a bit of a stretch. Although easy e did bring up an explanation as to how that could happen. Interesting post Priceguy.
FormerMarineGuy that’s certainly a possibility. The family is pretty racially mixed, so I don’t know if someone recorded the name of someone whose family started out in Europe, and the spelling changed over time, or if a former slave heard couple of different names and combined them to create new one for himself, or if someone just made a mistake while filling out the chart.
Thanks for all your help everyone.