My great-grandfather moved to the US from Belgium in the 1890’s. Someone in the family apparently found his father’s name and posted it to one of those on-line geneology sites. As far as I know, that’s as far back as anyone has traced the name. (I have an unusual last name and, as far as I know, everyone who has it is related to me.)
Some 20 years ago, while perusing a Spanish-language encyclopedia for a totally unrelated purpose, I chanced across the name of a village in northern France that was spelled almost exactly the same as my name. The only difference was that the village has an -S on the end which my name does not. Now this village is fairly close to the Belgium border (less than 100 km) so it could easily have been the source for our name. I haven’t heard that anyone has traced the family to that village, though.
My maiden name is also a common English word, though I’m not sure if it was used as a family name that far back. My married name is, as far as I can tell, unique to my family, since my in-laws Americanized their Polish name sometime after coming to the US after WWII, and no one else appears to have Americanized the same name in the same way.
My birth name, I can’t really go that far back on. It’s the most common name in Hungary. I was able to follow that particular line back to the late 1700s. The name I changed it to–also a family name–I’m able to trace back to its inception in the 1600s (it’s a dit name from Quebec, which has excellent genealogical resources).
What does everyone think the OP is asking? I’m inferring that he/she is asking “How far back can you find your family name in history?” But the response to the question in the OP doesn’t seem to jibe if that’s the case, since that is pretty recent.
My family name on my father’s side appears at least twice in my copy of the Domesday book, so is likely older than 1066. My mother’s family name is Scots/Irish so would originally have been a clan name rather than a family name.
My surname has only been in the family since my great-grandfather and his brothers moved from Finland to the US. They’d been using the Eric Johnson, father of Anders Ericson, father of Peter Anderson thing, but rather than sticking their kids with greatgreatgrandfather-son, they all picked the same new name. At least in my family, the name has only existed for about 120 years.
Now my family tree? I can trace it back several hundred years, on both sides.
My paternal ancestors just sort of pop out of nowhere into Appalachia (Madison County, KY) in the 1820’s. I had one of those y-chromosome DNA tests and my haplogroup is R-M222, a very common Irish and Scottish Gaelic lineage associated especially with Northern Ireland, the Hebrides, and Glasgow. Appalachia was heavily settled by lower-class rural Scottish Protestants (“Hillbillies”) looking for cheap farmland. Yee-haw!
My family name has been traced back to the 1500s in the midlands in the UK, and is distinctive enough to be able to take a fair guess back to the Norman invasion, because it is French-derived.
The ancestors who have been traced back definitively had a manor which has a moat (to this day). A moat; how cool is that! Unfortunately, at some point it passed to a daughter so it’s now owned by a family of a different name.
My paternal grandfather changed his last name shortly after returning from WWII. The original name has been traced back to 12th-century Spain, but that’s in a broad sense. It’s an extremely common name and I don’t have any sort of personal family tree.
My family name came into the family at some time between 1817 and 1854 when my great-great-grandfather bought and moved to the house associated with the family name and changed his last name accordingly. Things worked that way at the time in the Principality of Lippe, east of Westphalia.
My family name can be traced back to London in the 1830s, with hints of earlier origins in the county of Durham (but nothing solid to go on). I know where they lived and what they were doing - two, possibly three, generations of silk weavers - but before their time, all is shrouded in the fog of history.
My mother’s family name stems from a small town in western Sweden, where the original bearer took the name when he signed up as a soldier in the Swedish army - also in the 1830s. At that time, individual soldiers were given crofts to tend in order to provide for their own - and their families’ - upkeep; in many cases they took a new surname based on the name of the town or village in order to lessen confusion related to identity (Sweden was still using “X, son/daughter of Y” with names changing every generation very heavily). It got modified a little bit with my great-great-grandfather, and has stayed that way since.
My family name is recorded in Scotland from at least the late thirteenth century, and it’s related to the word “Welsh”, which derives from the Anglo-Saxon for “foreigner”, or in other words indicated someone descended from the original Brythonic Celtic inhabitants of lowland Scotland. The earliest direct ancestor of the name that I can trace with any certainty was a miller born in the 1780s. I am reasonably confident of having traced another of my ancestor families back to later Tudor times around the Kent/Sussex borders.
My family name is relatively uncommon. I have traced that side of the family back to the early 1800s, and they were living in the same county in Pennsylvania dairy country where most of them still live. According to Ancestry.com, this surname is still most prevalent in Pennsylvania, with Illinois and New York being next in prevalence.
The funny thing is that Ancestry.com claims that the surname is Spanish/Galician in origin, but as far as I can tell that portion of my family is German (or Germanic) from way back (which is also in keeping with the dairy country ties). I have this vague memory of my grandmother telling me it was Swiss (which makes some sense; the surname actually looks French to me), but I’ve got no outside confirmation of that.
I’m still hoping that on my mother’s side I will turn out to be the last living male descendent of some French nobility, but given:
[ol]
[li]I have plenty of older male cousins, and,[/li][li]That part of the family’s status as tradesmen (and one horse thief) in New Jersey as early as the mid-1700s,[/li][/ol]I’m not holding my breath.
I have a relatively uncommon surname. Afrikaans and thus Dutch in origin. Apparently a variant on a Latin personal name. I don’t know the particulars of my family tree beyond grandparents.
I can trace my ancestry to 1683, when the first of my family came to South Africa - can’t trace it back further in the Netherlands - only to the town from where he originated, as he took the town’s name as his surname.
I can do this because there is a book, written in the 1980’s, with my family tree listed - so I can trace my lineage back the 11 generations to the original who arrived in Cape Town.
Due to our interesting political environment here in South Africa, it always strikes me as weird when black people tell white people to “go back to Europe”. Where should I go to then? My family have been here for more than 300 years…
My father traced the family name back a few hundred years to a small town near Frankfurt. But there’s a very similar Hungarian name that’s more common, so my family name might have originally come from there.