A Columbian reader asks about the origin of surnames. Is it true, he asks, that sometime in the middle ages Europeans started using last names based on their occupation or where they lived? If so, when did this happen?

Names are important. They are our identity. Our surnames are our way of distinquishing one person from another. There is even a scientific field, etymology, that studies names. When I go to an Internet search engine and enter the terms "etymology" and "surnames," I find a number of dictionaries of names.

When I am faced with a question about surnames, I go to J. N. Hook's Family Names. Dr. Hook usually has the answer. He says that the process of acquiring surnames occurred during medieval times, but it did not occur at any particular date. It was a gradual process, and the development was traced by analyzing tax rolls, court records, and other surviving documents for those times.

Before the fourteenth century, people were referred to as "son of" or "from" a certain place. For instance, there is John at the water, or John from the mills, or John son of Gilbert. Later these names became John Atwater and John Mills and John Gilbertson.

A person could change their name during their lifetime. For instance, John the Red might become John the Bald. Names wouldn't necessarily pass from father to son. Surnames were a fleeting matter.

Dr. Hook cites a study of the most common American surnames and comes up with these statistics: 43 percent of them are place names, 32 percent are patronymics, 15 percent are occupational names, and 10 percent are descriptive nicknames.

A patronymic is the system of naming a person after their parent. Johnson is a typical example. For descriptive nicknames, one only needs to look at the telephone book to see Black and Brown and Duff and all of the other words that describe hair and skin coloring.

There are a number of books at the public library in the category of "names, personal." On a cool fall evening, a trip to the library to look at one of these would be entertaining. One of them may tell you what your name means.

While you are at the library, ask the librarian to point you to the computers that have the Ancestry databases. This subscription service is free to library patrons. You can look up names and find documents for your ancestors.

© 2004–2009

Connie Lenzen, CG

CG, Certified Genealogist is a service mark of the Board for Certification of Genealogists, used under license by Board-certified genealogists after periodic evaluation, and the board name is registered in the US Patent & Trademark Office.

The National Genealogical Society's "Research in the States" series includes an Oregon guide. To order a copy, go shop the NGS online store.