The Family Tree of Family Names

WHO has not at some time speculated on the derivation of his own name or noted the oddities and contradictions of those of his neighbors? For my own part I have followed this hobby of family names ever since, as a schoolboy, I noted among my companions the surnames White, Brown, Black, Blue, and wondered why there was no Red, since ruddy complexions and carroty hair must have been as common among our ancestors as among ourselves. I did not then know that Reade (and its various spellings, Reed, Reid, and so on) was the form that the nickname took when it became a family name. Neither then nor until long afterward did I have any opportunity for research into the devious ways of words. As others collected and classified postage stamps, I collected and classified names. The task seems endless, but there are a few guiding principles that will smooth the way for anyone.

Here in America, which is peopled by representatives of every race and tongue, the number of strange and perplexing names in our directories appears overwhelming. Yet the kinds of surnames, so far as their origin is concerned, are few. They all arose from the need of distinguishing persons of the same baptismal name. We fall back on a similar device when the circumstances are such that we cannot use personal names, either family or baptismal. In directing a stranger, we say, ‘Ask the man in the blue coat,’ ’See the man who is driving the cart,’ or ‘The man standing over by the hillside will know.’ That is, we describe him, give his location, or tell what he is doing. That is just what surnames did originally. Blue was applied to a person on account of his dress, Carter on account of his occupation, and Hill or Underhill on account of his position. Surnames may be classed, then, as descriptive epithets or nicknames, as occupational or trade names, and as topographical or place names. This classification is seemingly exhaustive, for how can we point a person out verbally except by telling what he looks like, what he is doing, or where he is?

Yet there is a fourth method of identification. In a settled community, where degrees of kinship are known, a reference to a relative of the person we have in mind, as ‘Tom’s (boy) Dick,’ ‘Samanthy’s Jane,’ is enough to specify the particular Dick or Jane intended. Usually the reference is to the father; hence these surnames are called patronymics. Names of this class are so common in all languages that they hardly need illustration: Harrison is the son of Harry, and Wilson is Will’s son. Within a square of where I am now writing are the families of Jackson, Jansen, Ivorson, and — a little farther away — Jones, their names all derivatives of John and equivalent to our English Johnson.

While it is agreed that fixed and permanent family names were brought into England by the followers of William the Conqueror and gradually spread over that country in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, no date can be set for their first appearance on the Continent. It is a mistake to assume that, before the vogue of hereditary surnames, our ancestors were unable to distinguish definitely such of their acquaintances as, by chance, bore the same baptismal name. Where language exists at all, description is possible, and a descriptive term joined to the given name was all that was needed. Freeman says that such added names were as common in England before the Conquest as after, but among the Saxons these additional names were not hereditary. A man did not share them with his wife and children; they were still individual and not family names. If not surnames, however, they were the material out of which surnames were formed. From which of the four classes of names were hereditary or entailed surnames first derived?

Under the patronymic system, the son took, in addition to his own baptismal name, the baptismal (or occupational) name of his father. Thomas would be known as the son of John, or Thomas Johnson. At first such names were not hereditary, but were surnames only in the original sense of that word — that is, designations ‘over and above’ the Christian name for purposes of identification. The name was handed down, but handed down for only one generation. In the next, Thomas Johnson’s son, who had been christened James, would be called, not James Johnson, but James Thompson. In Iceland, which was settled by the Norsemen in the ninth century, such alternation in names persists to this day. Eric, son of Magnus, is known as Eric Magnussen, but Eric’s own son, Olaf, will be known in his community as Olaf Ericsen. But in other ways than inheritance patronymics fall short of becoming family names in the full sense. The entire family did not share in them. The sons, as we have seen, found a common cognomen in their father’s personal name: John, the son of Andrew, became John Anderson. But what of his sister Mary? She, by all the rules of logic, could not be known as the son of Andrew, or as Mary Anderson. Equally absurd would be the extension of the name to John’s wife.

Nicknames do not seem any more likely than patronymics to have been the first to develop into hereditary surnames. A man may be known as the ‘Red Fox,’ but his sons, unless they inherit the complexion or traits that won him that sobriquet, will not inherit his name. They in their turn may acquire nicknames of their own, and these will be no more permanent than that of their father. Similarly with occupational names. A mountaineer who tends sheep may be known as ‘Jack the Shepherd,’ but his son who becomes a miner or goes to a distant city to learn a trade will not be called a shepherd. He will take his name from his own calling, or be designated by a nickname, or, as likely as not, take the name of the village from which he came. Nor will the shepherd’s daughter who keeps house for him be known by any term descriptive of her father’s vocation. None of these three classes of names show any decided tendency to become fixed and hereditary.

With place names it is different. There could have been nothing deliberate in the change in names by which they acquired a new function — that of tracing descent on the male line, from generation to generation. It happened, as it were, by the logic of events. If the early owner of an estate, say ‘The Hedges,’ took his name from his residence, and his descendants, several generations later, were found occupying the same homestead and were known by the same affixed name, Hedges, it would be assumed that they had inherited the name as well as the property. The name came to mean a descendant of the earliest Hedges; it traced lineage because it traced property.

At a time when feudalism with its special class privileges was spreading over Europe, men found it an advantage to bear the name of their grandfather or of some noted ancestor. The other three classes — patronymics, nicknames, and occupational names — were remodeled after the new pattern. The step, however, was not taken without some hesitation; for a long time entries like ‘Mary, Tom’s daughter’ were found in the English parish registries. The title of one of Sigrid Undset’s novels, Kristin Lavransdatter, reminds us that the same objections once prevailed in Scandinavia. But people finally came to ignore the verbal contradiction in Mary Thompson just as they did in the name John White, whose owner was a dark man, or John Castle, whose home was a hovel, or John Carpenter, who was a grocer. People no longer took their words too literally. And for many of us there has been progress in forgetfulness.