OUR SURNAMES

Waipa Post, Volume XXIV, Issue 1638, 7 May 1925, Page 3

OUR SURNAMES

HOW THEY ORIGINATED.

Hereditary surnames did not come into use until .about 1450 A.D. Prior to that the population was so thin that people had merely a' Christian name, and a nickname that only gradually began to be borne hereditarily. The grandfather would be known, for instance, as Thomas of Greystones, if Greystones were the name of the village. One son would be Thomas the Little if he were short of stature. Another would be Henry the Potter, and Edward, son of John the Potter (soon John Potter), became Edward Johnson. Another grandson who became a page would be Edgar Page. Gradually the advantages of maintaining the same family surname became apparent, and this became customary (writes Bassett Digby, in the Daily Express). Each surname in the directory was acquired in one of five ways, irrespective of whether it was first borne by Saxon or Norman. Either it was a nickname, like Short; or the name of a place, like Hadley; or the name of an occupation, like Baker; or official, like Chamberlain; or baptismal (ending in “son,” for instance). Baptismal and place-name surnames are most plentiful.

A patient genealogist, who sorted out the first 30,000 or so names in the London directory, found that 11,360 of them were place names or corruptions of place names. Of baptismal names there were 8203,, and of occupdtive names 2651. Official names (Stewart, Priest, Judge, Lord, Spenser, Clark, and so forth, numbered 1737, and nicknames 3096. Fifteen hundred more names were foreign, and 1700 so corruppted > -at it was impossible to place them in any category.

A great tribe of modern surnames, including all the Ellises, Elliotts, Elkinsons, and Elcocks, derive from Elias, a very popular name at the time of the Crusades. Practically all names beginning with “De ” are of French of Italian origin. The Deaths and Dearths should convey no grim association, for they are merely descendants of mediaeval immigrants from tne Flanders village of D’Teth