Wow, I did not think that there would be distinctly French Canadian names among those. Especially Gauthier, but Wikipedia indeed lists mostly Canadians.
The way I understand it, the royal family gave the name as a sign of prestige. So many people also changed their name to Nguyen to bandwagon onto more famous Nguyens.
The Cayman Islands did not have an indigenous population when discovered by Columbus in May 1503. It was later permanently settled by a very small group, only 6 families, IIRC. And those very earliest settlers gave rise to the most common Caymanian family names, particularly Ebanks, Bodden, and McLaughlin.
We once had a Brazilian exchange student and I remember him saying half the Sao Paulo phone book was either Martin or Barbosa.
Not sure what you mean by the same everywhere. Aside from Levi, there is Levy, Levin, Levitan. Aside from Cohen, I have seen Cohn, Cohan, Cahan, Kahn, Kahane, Kan, and I know a Kon, although that is rare.
For Brazil in general (I don’t know the situation in Sao Paulo), Silva is by far the most popular surname, comprising a bit over 10% of the population. Next is Santos, with 6.7% and Sousa with 4.9% Just those three names account for 1 in 5 surnames in Brazil.
(Martins is #13 at 1.83% and Barbosa is #16 at 1.52%).
The commonness of ‘Smith’ may be related to the specificity of the occupation. An industrious family might use their woodworking skills to build a mill and their culinary skills to produce cake from the milled grain — would they be known as Carpenter, Miller or Baker? But a Smith is a Smith.
Nitpick: The use of ‘farmer’ to mean churl or husbandman may be as recent as the 1590’s. ‘Farmer,’ formerly often spelled ‘Fermor,’ is an occupational surname meaning tax-collector.
Also, unlike ‘Atwood’ (for people who lived at the wood or forest) or ‘Banker’ (for people who lived at the riverbank or hill-slope), ‘Rivers’ was not a common geographic name but usually more aristocratic — Rivière being specific and generic placenames in France and Belgium (but especially Normandy). Many English aristocrats surnamed ‘Rivers’ descend from Richard Woodville whose interesting connections made him first Baron and later Earl Rivers. This ‘Rivers’ seems to derive from Woodville’s noble ancestor Redvers/Reviers which name derives from the town of Reviers in Normandy.
And many surnames have multiple sources, with spellings that eventually merged. For example ‘Revere’ may derive from afore-mentioned ‘de la Riviere’ or ‘Reviers’; or it could be an occupational surname ‘Reiver’ (robber!) or a common geographic surname ‘atter Evere’ (living at the brow of a hill).
Note that Cohen, Cohn, Cohan, Cahan and Kahn are all spelled the same in Hebrew, as are Levi and Levy. But even setting that aside, my bet is that the original versions of the name were by far the most common everywhere, simply because they’re the versions that appear in scripture, and Jews all read the same bible no matter where they were. Remember, being a Cohen or a Levi actually has ritual meaning in Judaism - so if you’re a Cohen, you’d want people to know you’re a Cohen. That helps prevent linguistic creep.
Tremblay does indeed sound typically Canadian French to me, as does Gagnon to a slightly lesser extent. Roy and Gauthier could be European French surnames, however.
On a similar note, I’ve often been amazed by the huge variety of place names. You’d think that many of them you’d be called “River” or “Forest” or “Hill” or perhaps even just “Village” but in fact, you find an astonishing diversity of names.
The most common Dutch surnames are the following:
1 de Jong - “the younger”, so dad had the same first name
2 Jansen - son of Jan
3 de Vries - these guys wanted Napoleon to know they were Frisian
4 van den Berg - “Which Jan?” “The one who lives by the hill.”
5 van Dijk - “Which Jan?” “The one who lives on the dyke.”
6 Bakker - baker
7 Janssen - son of Jan again (not sure why they’re not adding these up together?)
8 Visser - fisherman
9 Smit - finally, the smith at number 9!
10 Meijer - like mayor, but probably also meant landlord (I think?)
Capitalising the Van or De or even adding it to he rest of the name (Vanderbilt) is usually only done in other countries. In the Netherlands, it would be van der Bilt.
Unsurprisingly there are many, many water-related surnames that are very common:
When the Code Napoléon was adopted in the Netherlands, the Burgerlijke Stand was also created. In the Burgerlijke Stand all births, marriages, divorces and deaths are recorded. Everyone had to choose an official surname and stick with it. Some people tried to piss off Napoleon by choosing something funny, so some people are called Naaktgeboren (born naked) or Poepjes (poopies). Not sure how pissed off Napoleon was, tbh. Probably not the most effective form of civil disobedience.
Interesting, there’s a Fermor Avenue in Winnipeg, so I guess now I know what it means. (It also means “gold farming” is a historically accurate profession. ;))
In the US and Canada, the most common origin of names is to be named after some person.[sup]1[/sup] Usually someone who was among the first people there – early settler, first postmaster, first store owner (who may be two or three of those in one person), – but could also be a mine or mill owner, someone associated with the railroad, or a famous person (most commonly a president or general). Or a relative (usually female) of one of those people.
Descriptive names that you are suggesting are the second most common. However, even in those, there’s often some specific to distinguish this forest or river from all those other forests and rivers. That said, the most common individual names are mostly descriptive without a specific: Fairview, Five Points, Midway, Mount Pleasant, Riverside, Oak Grove, Centerville, Fairfield, Pleasant Valley, Mountain View, Springfield, etc.
In the Old World, origins of placenames are not as well known. Researching them is more like recreating a dead language than looking up historical records. But I expect that the origins fall the same basic pattern: names derived from people’s names are most common followed by descriptive names. However, they’ve been around for centuries and subject to various modifications. So even if they were originally the same, they likely aren’t any more.
[sup]1[/sup] The exception being in southern New England where most towns are named after an English town or county.
I can tell you of a type of Spanish lastname which was still being born in the Americas: toponymics.
A toponymic lastname is one which identifies where someone comes from. We often use them as nicknames (Íñigo López called Loyola later renamed Ignatius and still called Loyola; Francisco Jaso called Xavier). If instead of being Jesuits with no known children Iggy and Frank had moved away from home and been in the company of many other men called Iggy and Frank, their children might inherit the nicknames. There are tons of those in the center-north of Spain, pretty much any village or town has an accompanying lastname (or even several with ortographic variations, see Ugarte / Huarte). But some of these were born in America, when people from those areas moved over there and you got for example ten guys called Juan of which two were Juan Samanes. OK, so what’s their second lastnames? Uh, Samanes. What, for both of them? Well, yeah, one is from Valtierra and one from Arguedas, everybody there is a Samanes except for those who are Les! OK, so we’ll call them Juan Valtierra and Juan Arguedas. And then their children inherited the nicknames…
Sure, because, again, Quebec was founded by a relatively small number of people; it just stands to reason that fewer surnames would have migrated over and they would not necessarily be the most popular ones in modern day France.
If I had some time today I’d look up similar correlations; do surnames in Brazil more or less match those in Portugal? Spanish-speaking countries versus Spain itself? What about other French colonies?
A little known fact is the English surname Farnsworth means “slow-footed defenceman.”
From my neck of the woods.
Most common Cajun names:
I went to school in West Texas with a pair of siblings named Tremblay. Always assumed it was just French. They never indicated any Canadian connections.
There are also Boudreauxes and Benoits all over Nova Scotia. An unbelievable number of people - maybe 98% of everyone I’ve talked to about this - are unaware that the Acadians settled in Nova Scotia. Most people aren’t even sure where Nova Scotia is, or they confuse it with Prince Edward Island and assume it’s an island.
There are also a lot of Melansons (spelled with an S, not a C) in the Maritimes. The name Gillis is also unbelievably common there - though I think this name may be Scottish and not French.
Well, talk about coincidence, this article was published today. It’s in French but I edited it to make it easier to parse, so it shouldn’t be a problem :
Brussels has quite a few of foreign origin, but I’m surprised that a west African name is #1. And even if there is a big population from there, it’s just one surname of many. Not sure what kind of name Bah is but it doesn’t sound French or Dutch.
Bah also appears to be West African. I agree that it’s unexpected.
The phenomenon of Asians of all nationalities having just a few extremely popular names is a result of many hundreds of years of only royalty and nobles having surnames. Once it became socially acceptable for commoners to adopt surnames, most families shrewdly chose names that were associated with popular royals and nobles, thereby raising their perceived social status (or aligning themselves with those currently in power who would be “friendlier” to others sharing their name). Thus you end up with millions of people named Kim, Lee, Park, Nguyen, Wang, Zhang, Liu, etc. Unsurprisingly, as China was the dominant force in the region for millennia, almost all of these names are Chinese in origin.