Surname Saturday - Fleury

Many surnames have their origins in the natural world. Because it's the month of May, it seems appropriate to take a look at some floral surnames. One such name in my own family tree is the name Fleury. The name occurs in French Canada, but my ancestor with this name lived in Brittany, in what is now the department of Loire-Atlantique.  The name Fleury is an adjective derived from the noun fleur 'flower'.  In addition to a surname, Fleury is common as or as part of place names in France (see here).  The name was most likely applied to a place where flowers commonly bloomed.

My seventh great grandfather Pierre Fleury married Anne Guchet on May 4, 1756 in Saint-Jean-de-Boiseau.  The following excerpt from their marriage record gives information about the couple's parents and their places of origin.  Pierre Fleury's mother-in-law also fits the floral theme.

 ...pierre fleury fils de Louise gabrielle fleury sa mere, agé de dix neuf ans environ, du pelerin natif, et anne guchet fille de pierre guchet et de janne bouquet ses pere et mere de cette paroisse..

...Pierre Fleury son of Louise Gabrielle Fleury his mother, aged around nineteen years, native of Le Pelerin, and Anne Guchet daughter of Pierre Guchet and Jeanne Bouquet his father and mother of this parish...

Notice how only Pierre's mother is listed and that she has the same surname.  This probably indicates that Pierre was illegitimate.

Surname Saturday: Breton

St. Louis Cemetery #1, New Orleans, LA

This month I am taking a closer look at surnames that indicate a national, ethnic or regional origin.  Many French surnames indicate the region of origin of their bearers.  Before the French Revolution, France was divided into 40 provinces.  To a large extent, these provinces define the historical regions of France.  After the Revolution, France was reorganized with regions replacing provinces.  Although some of the names of provinces were kept as region names, the territories were changed.  For example, the large province of Normandy was divided into two separate regions, Upper Normandy and Lower Normandy.

Common surnames associated with provinces include Picard for Picardy (Fr. Picardie), Normand for Normandy (Fr. Normandie) and the topic of this post, Breton, along with the variants Lebreton and Le Breton (as seen in the inscription pictured above).  The surname Breton is noteworthy because the name can indicate both a geographical and an ethnic origin. Brittany is divided into two separate parts, Upper Brittany to the East and Lower Brittany to the West.  In Lower Brittany, a distinctly Celtic people persisted, maintaining their language and cultural.  In Upper Brittany, during the Middle Ages, the Breton language was slowly replaced by the Romance language, Gallo, which is closely related to French and other Romance varieties of Northern France. From the 15th century to the 19th century, the linguistic frontier was relatively stable between the two regions.  Thus, Breton carries a stronger ethnic connotation when applied to someone from Lower Brittany.  My own ancestors from Brittany are split evenly between the Breton-speaking Lower Brittany and French- and Gallo-speaking Upper Brittany.

However, my ancestors with the name Breton are from Paris.  My 10th great grandmother, Marguerite Breton, was born in Paris, immigrated to Quebec and married Nicolas Patenostre (Patenaude) in 1651.  However, it is not too surprising to find this name in Paris; we would expect to find names indicating a region of origin more outside the region than in it. Being a Breton is more notable in a place where everyone else is not also a Breton.  In the period between 1891 and 1915, the greatest number of Bretons are living in Paris (map).  Although the name is common in Finistère, it is relatively rare in the other departments which cover Lower Brittany.  Similarly, the largest numbers of Picards in the same period are found outside Picardy in Paris and the department of Seine-Maritime in Normandy (map). My ancestor's family presumably adopted the name Breton because the family originated in Brittany.

Surname Saturday - Fleming

Some surnames directly reflect the ethnicity or national origin of the bearer.  For some reason, these names are especially common in Hungary where names like Tóth, "Slav", Horváth "Croat", Németh "German", Oláh "Vlach or Romanian" and Rácz "Serb or South Slav"  are all among the most common surnames.

Although these types of names are not as common in other places, theses names are present in many different regions.  This month I will be exploring names of this type in my own family.  I will start with my fourth great grandmother Polly Anne Fleming (1823-1907).  Both of her parents were born in Massachusetts, but she was born in New York.  The family eventually made their way to Lorain County, Ohio, where she married English immigrant and tailor, John Wood.  The couple had three children, including my third great grandfather Benjamin Franklin Wood (1847-1986).  While her children were still you, her husband died and she remarried soon after. With her children and second husband, Alonzo Stanton, she relocated to Jackson County, Michigan.

All indications point to a British background for the family; they followed a typical migration route for many New Englanders. But the name provides a possibility for another more distant origin for the family.  The surname Fleming comes from the Middle Dutch Vlâming, a term for an inhabitant of Flanders (OED).  This region extends from the Netherlands to France, with the largest part in modern Belgium.  In general its people speak a dialect of Dutch called "Flemish". As one of the closest regions to England in continental Europe, the two places had close political and economic ties.  As a result, there was some immigration of Flemings to England.  It is possible that my Flemings go back to one of these immigrants

Of course, names can be tricky things and are not by themselves proof of origins.  It is possible there is another explanation for the name; maybe the name was given because members of the family had characteristics which were considered stereotypical of the group.

Surname Saturday - Lefebvre

Today's Surname Saturday post will round out the month of Smiths. So far, we have discussed English Smith, Slavic Kowatch and Breton Le Goff. This week we are going to stay in France, but turn to the French surname Lefebvre. French is a Romance language, one of Europe's "Big Three" language families together with Germanic and Slavic. The Romance languages have their origins in Latin.

The surname Lefenvre was carried to North America by early settlers of Quebec, including my wife's 10th great grandmother, Angélique Lefebvre, who also happens to be the mother-in-law of my 11th cousin once removed, Pierre Samson.

The ultimate origin of the name Lefebvre and variants like Lefèvre is the Latin word faber meaning "craftsman". You may recognize the root in English words of Latin origin like fabricate and fabric.  Through a process of semantic narrowing, the word took on the more specific meaning of a craftsman in metal. This term is no longer used in Modern French where we find forgeron. 

This name is mainly found in the north of France in Normandy and the regions of Picardy, Île-de-France, and Nord-Pas-de-Calais, areas that supplied many of the settlers of New France including a number of bearers of this name (See map).  You may also have noticed that this name includes the definite article "le".  Unlike Le Goff where the article is usually written as a separate word, Lefebvre is almost always written as a single word.  For more discussion of the use of article in French names, check this earlier post.

Surname Saturday: Le Goff

Today, we continue with the Smith theme moving from the East back to the West.  So far, we have seen Germanic Smith and Slavic Kowatch.  Now, let's turn to the Western edge of Europe and the Celtic language family.

At one time, speakers of Celtic languages were spread across Europe over France, Spain and Central  Europe (see map here).  Celts settled as far away as Asia Minor (Turkey), where they are known as Galatians (as in Paul's Epistle to the Galatians). However, with the Roman conquest and later movements of people, including Germanic and Slavic peoples, the languages of the continental Celts were replaced by other languages, like the precursors of Romance languages, such French, Spanish, and Italian.  The Celtic languages survived only in the British Isles, where they were threatened by another invasion, that of the Angles, Saxons and other Germanic peoples.  Speakers of British Celtic were pushed to the West surviving in Wales and Cornwall.  Another group left Great Britain and settled in what is now Brittany.  The similarity between the names Britain and Brittany is not a coincident.  The Breton language has close ties to its British cousins, Welsh and Cornish.

To this day, the Breton language continues in Brittany, although it has rapidly lost ground to French over the last two centuries.  The language survives in many place names and surnames.  One common surname of Breton origin is that of my 7th great grandmother, Catherine Le Goff, the wife of François Marquer and the daughter of Pierre Le Goff and Marie Perrot.  The name Le Goff comes from the Breton word for blacksmith, gov.  Like many Breton surnames, it is formed by adding the French article Le before the Breton element, perhaps translating the original Breton article Ar.  Also, as is common with languages which were not standardized or used in written form until relatively late, the spelling of names often diverges significantly from the modern standard. 

Surname Saturday - Kowatch

This month I am focusing on surnames that are in some way related to that most common of English surnames, Smith.  Like people, languages can be grouped into families that are related by descent from a common ancestor.  Languages in the same family will resemble each other in many ways.  Last Saturday, I talked about the surname Smith, which comes from the word for someone who works with metal. English belongs to the Germanic language family which includes German, Dutch and Scandinavian languages.  So, you find surnames like Schmidt in German or Smit in Dutch with the same meaning and origin.

In Europe there are three very large and important language families: Germanic in the North, Romance in the South, and Slavic in the East. In Slavic surnames derived from the word meaning Smith are also very common.  These include Kowalski and Kowalczyk in Polish, Kovář in Czech, Kováč in Slovak, Koval and Kovalenko in Ukranian, Kovalev in Russian, and Kovač in Serbian. 


Mathias Kowatch in the US Census

My second great aunt, Gertrude Schoendorf, married Matthew Kowatch.  This surname is most likely related to the Slavic surnames described above.  But, before we examine how it is related, let's take a look at my aunt's father-in-law, Mathias Kowatch  In a post earlier this week (here), I explained how we can use census to explore our linguistic heritage. Mathias Kowatch can be found in four censues (1900, 1910, 1920 and 1930).  Several different responses are provided for his place of birth. These include both the place listed on his enumeration and that of his son.

1900 - Hungary
1910 - Germany
1920 - Slk/Hun.
1930 - Czechoslovakia/Hungary

But in the three years where the mother tongue is provided, German is given.  What's going on here?

First, the 1910 census appears to involve a mistake.  I would guess that the enumerator assumed Mathias was from Germany because he speaks German.  This would fall into the category of an error.  For the other cases we have to understand something about the history of the region. Before 1918, much of eastern Europe was under the control of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This empire was divided into two main parts: Austria and the Kingdom of Hungary. The Kingdom of Hungary covered modern Hungary along with modern Slovakia and parts of Romania and the former Yugoslavia.  The kingdom also contained large numbers of German minorities scattered throughout (See map of ethnic makeup of the empire here).  The pattern in the censuses suggest that Mathias was from what is now Slovakia and that he was a member of the German speaking minority.

Another clue comes from another error by the enumerator, but this time the error is in our favor.  Although the enumerator is only supposed to give the country of birth, sometimes a more specific location is given.  The 1920 census provides the following information:

This somewhat difficult to decipher place name may correspond to the town of Medzev, Slovakia, which is known in German as Metzenseifen.

The development of the surname Kowatch
Now that we have a better understanding of Mathias Kowatch, we can return to his surname.  One of the most common names in Slovakia is Kováč, meaning "smith".  In Hungarian, one of the most common names Kovács, which is spelled differently—both Slovak č and Hungarian cs are pronounced like English ch—but sounds pretty much the same way.  The Hungarian name is a borrowing from Slavic.  The name Kowatch, which was probably originally Kowatsch, is the German spelling of this Slavic name; German w corresponds to v  and tsch corresponds to the ch-sound.  Tsch may have been changed to tch under the influence of English words like "watch".

It is possible that this Kowatch family was originally Slovak or Hungarian, but were later Germanized, but there is no way to tell from the available evidence.  Perhaps a DNA test would offer some evidence. This is a good example of how names are not always the best guide to the ethnicity of your ancestors.  Although the origin of a name may point to your ancestors' origins, this may be very remote with your ancestors having assimilated to another culture long ago or they may have adopted a name which is unrelated to their own family's origins.

Surname Saturday - Smith

Any person with substantial British ancestry probably has a Smith somewhere in the family tree. In my own tree it's my 6th great grandmother, Martha (Smith) Kingsbury (1710-1771) of Norwich, Connecticut. No English surname really compares to Smith in terms of frequency. In the United States Smith is still by far the most common surname occurring 2,376,206 times in the 2000 census, outstripping the next most common surname, Johnson, by more than 500,000 (Census Bureau website).

The name Smith is an occupational surname for people who originally worked with metal, such as blacksmiths, tinsmiths, etc. Although it is not entirely clear to me why this particular occupation would be so widely adopted as a surname, it is clear that it has. Not only is the surname exceedingly common in the English-speaking world, but surnames derived from metal-working professions are among the most common surnames across Europe, including the surnames Schmidt in Germany, Ferrari in Italy, Kowalski in Poland, Lefebvre/Lefèvre in France, De Smet in Belgium, Kovács in Hungary and several others. The main exceptions are places where surnames are mainly derived from patronymics such as Scandinavia and Spain (for earlier posts dealing with patronymics click here and here).

For the month of March, I am going to do a series of Surname Saturday posts on names in my own family that are related to or have similar origins to the name Smith.

Surname Saturday - Wood

For President's Day I wrote a post about the widespread practice of naming children after presidents, a practice which has largely fallen out of fashion. In this country, presidents are held in particularly high regard. Their faces decorate our money and their monuments and memorials define our nation's capital. Still, there is probably only one figure in American History who, though never president, rivals even the greatest presidents in fame, Benjamin Franklin.

Not surprisingly, many Americans have been named after him, including my third great grandfather, Benjamin Franklin Wood (1847-1896). However, since this is a post about surnames, let's take a look at the name "Wood". Although many surnames have obscure origins, others hide nothing. "Wood" is clearly of English origin, which in my family's case is supported by the fact that Benjamin's father, John Wood, was a native of England who immigrated sometime in the first half of the nineteenth century. The meaning is also clear; it probably originally indicated the place where the bearer of the name lived or customarily worked, that is a wood or forest.

Surname Saturday - Boutron dit Major

Last week, I discussed one of the complications of doing research in French Canada (here). In addition to the widespread variations in spelling, French Canadian surnames present another challenge for genealogists. One common practice in North America was to use dit-names in addition to the surname. The word "dit" means "said" and can be translated as "called". For example, one of my wife's lines went by the name Boutron dit Major, Boutron being the surname and Major being the dit-name.

A common explanation for this practice is that the names were adopted in order to distinguish families carrying the same name. However, you will find that this practice is very widespread covering both common names and rarer ones, so it is probably best just to think of this more as a fashion that became popular in this part of the world. Despite how common this is in Canada, I have yet to encounter it in my non-Canadian French ancestors.

In many records you will find the full name given, the surname with the dit-name. In these cases, the dit-names can be useful, helping you identify the correct records. What makes these types of names more difficult is that either the dit-name or the surname is often omitted. In some records you may find members of the Boutron dit Major family listed simply as Boutron or simply as Major. When French Canadians migrated to the United States, sometimes they kept the surname and sometimes the dit-name. After they moved to New York, my wife's ancestors used "Major", a name which needed no anglicization.

There are two other complications with dit-names. First, for women, "dit" takes the feminine form "dite", Boutron dite Major. Second, the dit is often omitted giving you Boutron Major. Make sure you check all the possibilities.

If you are working back from the US to Canada, it is helpful to determine whether the surname derives from the original surname or a dit-name. A helpful online resource is provided by the American-French Genealogical Society. If you look up a name, you will find a number of associated names, this includes spelling variations, common anglicizations, dit-names associated with particular surnames and surnames associated with particular dit-names. Unfortunately, the database does not indicate the relationship only that the names are associated. The resource is also helpful in cases where a name is difficult to read in a record. If the surname is illegible, a legible dit-name may be the clue you need to connect that person to someone in another record.

Surname Saturday - Pageot

One challenge in researching French Canadian ancestors is dealing with the often wide variations in the spelling of a name. In French, it is often possible to represent the same sound in many different ways. This is especially true at the ends of word, where final letters are "silent", that is they are not pronounced.

Take the name "Pageot", the surname of my 4th great grandmother in my matrilineal line, Marcelline Pageot (1822-1867). I have found this name spelled at least four different ways in records relating to my direct ancestors: Pageot, Pajeau, Pajot and Pajeot. In this case, there seems to be very little pattern to which spelling is used. The first spelling is the most common and is found throughout my family's time in Canada. The following time line shows the variations in spelling over time.

1675 - Pageot
1703 - Pajot
1731 - Pageot
1731 - Pajeot
1755 - Pajeot
1785 - Pajot
1794 - Pageot
1820 - Pajeau
1822 - Pajeau
1839 - Pageot
1841 - Pageot
1850 - Pageot
1861 - Pajot
1867 - Pageot

This kind of variation can make it very difficult to decide on what spelling to use. Deciding on a standard can be helpful for organizing your research, but it is not always clear what the best choice is. Not only does the spelling often vary from generation to generation, but can vary over the lifetime of a single individual. For example, this surname is spelled three different ways on records for Marcelline Pageot. "Pajeau" on her baptismal record, "Pajot" on the 1861 Census of Canada, and "Pageot" on both marriage and burial records. The choice of spelling you use in your own records is a somewhat arbitrary choice. In this case, I have used "Pageot" because it seems the most frequent and is closest to the form used by relatives who immigrated to the United States. These relatives added a "g" to the spelling Paggeot.

Another possibility is to use the standardized forms of the surnames established by the PRDH and developed to facilitate use of their databases. A useful tool on the PRDH website allows you to enter a variant and find the standardized form (here). This tool can also be used in other helpful ways. Look at the results for my search on PAGEOT. As you can see the standardized form is PAGEAU. Notice that over twenty different variants are listed. Now, look at rightmost column, it shows how frequent each variant is. The three most common variants are PAJEOT, PAJOT and PAGEOT. You can use this information to do smarter searchers. Start with the most common variants and work your way down.

Surname Saturday - Shufflebottom

A medical journal seems an unusual place to find inspiration for a Surname Saturday post, but here is the full text of a fun study that investigates the origin of the Shufflebottom last name.

It seems that family tradition among some people who have this last name is that it comes from the way their infants move around. Unlike most children who crawl before they walk, many Shufflebottoms are supposed to sit on their bottoms and pull with their legs. In America we usually call this behavior butt-scooting, but in England it is often bum "shuffling."

To try to figure out if this behavior is the origin of the name, the researchers interviewed people with the name Shufflebottom and asked about how their children got around as infants. In a clever comparison, they also asked a similar number of people with the surname "Walker" the same questions. They found no difference in the rates of shuffling between the two groups.

The authors of the study gave a few explanations for why their results might not have supported the family tradition. One possibility is Shufflebottom infants may have shown this behavior a long time ago, but crawling may have become more common after many generations of marrying other families that did not favor this behavior. The article also addresses the possibility of a different origin of the surname altogether.

Full Article Citation:

Fox, A. T., Palmer, R. D., & Davies, P. (2002). Do “Shufflebottoms” bottom shuffle? Archives of Disease in Childhood, 87(6), 552 -554. doi:10.1136/adc.87.6.552

Surname Saturday - Mapping Polish surnames

There are many resources that can help you get a handle on your ancestors' surnames. One helpful resource are tools that can be used to map the frequency and distribution of a particular surname. These can tell you whether the name is specific to a particular region or is common throughout the country. If the name is relatively uncommon, these tools can help you narrow your search considerably. There are tools like this for many countries, including Poland. The site where you can map your Polish surnames is in Polish, but you should be able to figure out a lot just by context. Enter your surname in the box and click szukaj, which means "search".

There are two different types of maps one that gives the total number of the surname (Podział kompletny) and one that gives relative frequencies (Podział relatywny). To switch between the two types of maps click on these phrase to the right of a blue arrow.

With more common surnames the relative frequency map will be more useful because the absolute number will be highest in big cities, so you won't get the proper picture of where the name is most popular.

Also, pay close attention to the key for the map. The magnitude for the numbers will be quite different for a very common name like Nowak and a less common one like Szeszycki. The construction od...do... means "from...to...." and więcej niż means "more than". For Nowak the red is for "more than 2000".

But for Szeszycki, it is for "more than 12". This is a big difference.

The subdivision shown on the map is that of the county, or powiat. You can identify the county by moving the cursor over the map. For Szeszycki, you will find that the name is most common in the counties of Gniezno, Słupca and Krotoszyn, three counties, all in the province of Wielkopolska, or Greater Poland. This provides a place to start in your search.

Surname Saturday: Szeszycki

Exploring your Polish roots can be intimidating. This is understandable; Polish presents a number of challenges, but these challenges are not insurmountable.

One difficulty is the writing system. For Europe, Polish and other Slavic languages have a relatively large number of consonants (see The World Atlas of Language Structures). When the Latin alphabet was adapted to fit the sounds of Slavic languages like Polish and Czech, new letters and combinations of letters have to be used. Words beginning with "szcz" are enough to send anyone running for the hills. This combination of sounds is similar to the English "sh" sound followed by the English "ch" sound. Think of the phrase "Irish cheese". However, unlike English, this combination can start a word.

Knowing even a little about how these combinations are pronounced can go a long way in demystifying the language. A name like "Szeszycki" is more manageable when you realize that the "sz" is not too different from English "sh".

Surname Saturday - Le Bourhis

Genealogy rarely provides simple answers to the question of who our ancestors were. We want something that we can hold on to, something that changes the way we see ourselves. We often embrace part of our ancestry. We try some recipes, take a dance class or start learning a new language. At the same time, we ignore the complexity that is there. We may downplay other parts of our family's past. Even in those cases that seem most clear cut, you may find surprises.

These complexities are sometime found even in the names of our ancestors. For all of human history, people have been moving around and mixing. Evidence for this is written in to our DNA and often displayed in surnames. Most names cannot be simply described by phrases like "an English name" or "a Russian name". Sometimes, names will even combine elements from more than one language.

One such surname is that of my second great grandmother, Marie Eugénie Le Bourhis. Marie Eugénie was born in Nantes, France on August 26, 1879. Her parents were from the department of Côtes-du-Nord (now Côtes d'Armor). Her father was born in Plouguernével, where many generations of Le Bourhis had lived before him.

The origin of the name is complicated. The name in its current form is clearly French; it includes the French definite article Le "the" and the name follows French orthography (spelling conventions). The name itself, however, has its origin in the Breton language, the Celtic language of Brittany. The area these ancestors were from was Breton-speaking. Bourhis comes from the Breton word bourc'hiz ['burxis], which means "people who live in a small market town". The word bourc'h by itself is the word for "village" or "small market town". Notice the combination c-apostrophe-h. It is used to indicate a velar fricative like the German ch in Bach. Without the apostophy ch is pronounced like English sh.

There is a suffix -ad in Breton which is used to indicate an inhabitant of a place. For example, Brittany is Breizh and so breizhad is one way of referring to a person from Brittany. In the plural, -ad is replaced by -iz and so breizhiz means Bretons. Bourc'hiz follows this same pattern with the singular form bourc'had, and thus means "inhabitants of a small market town". Bourc'hiz can also have the meaning of "middle-class" or "bourgeois".

There is one further layer to this name. The Breton word for a small market town is a Germanic borrowing. This word is related to the -burg of Hamburg and the -bury of Kingsbury (discussed here). This borrowing occurred long ago, perhaps before the Bretons migrated to France from Great Britain. The same Anglo-Saxons invasions that brought this word may have also caused the migration.

So, when someone asks what kind of name Le Bourhis is, you can simply state that it is Franco-Germano-Celtic.

Surname Saturday - Rogers

By a strange coincidence, the one surname (so far) that occurs on both my mom's side and my dad's side is Rogers. By another coincidence, on both sides I have Rogers marrying other Rogers, the only two cases of same surname marriages in my family tree. On my dad's side are my fourth great grandparents, Josiah Rogers and Jane Rogers, and on my mom's side are my fifth great grandparents, Abel Rogers and Hannah Rogers.

Josiah and Jane lived in Warren County, Tennessee. They are generally believed to be cousins, although I have not found direct evidence of this. According to the 1850 Census, Josiah Rogers was born in North Carolina around 1798 and Jane was born in Tennessee around 1801. I believe Jane Rogers is the daughter of Levi Rogers and Sarah Cope, based on the will of Levi Rogers and circumstantial evidence from the 1850 census. In his will, reference is made to both a Jane Rogers who is a daughter and a Josiah Rogers, the only male Rogers in the will not described as a son. In the 1850 Census, Jane and Josiah are living near Levi Rogers' sister, Polly, and several of Levi's children who are mentioned in the will.

Abel Rogers and Hannah Rogers lived in Lyme, Connecticut. They married on Feb. 19, 1874 at the New Haven Second Church in Lyme. According to his Pension file, Abel Rogers was employed as a teamster in the United States Service during the Revolutionary War.

The surname Rogers is derived from a patronymic, a name which provides information about the father. Rogers means "son of Roger". Forms with a final -s are the primary English way of forming patronymics, although surnames derived from patronymics with -son are common due to Scandinavian influence in Scotland and the northern parts of England as are those with the French prefix Fitz- (French fils "son") and Celtic Mac- or Mc- (from the Gaelic word for son).

Rogers and Soundex
Michael John Neill's Genealogy Tip of the Day was about the problems you can encounter when dealing with languages other than English. He gives some very good advice about being wary when doing Soundex searches on French surnames in particular. It is important to keep in mind that Soundex was designed with English in mind, so often falls apart when dealing with non-English names. Soundex is a great tool, but even with English names the results may miss something. In an earlier post I discussed some of the problems with the surname Simpson and the variant form Simson. Rogers is another name that can cause some problems for Soundex. One of the most common variants of Rogers is Rodgers. The alternation between "g" and "dg" is one that will result in different Soundex codes. Rogers has the Soundex code R262, while Rodgers has the code R326. If you have names where either "d" or "dg" can occur, like Rogers, Padgett or Egerton, you need to be careful when using Soundex.

Surname Saturday - Schoendorf

Paul Schoendorf, my great-great-grandfather, settled in Cleveland, Ohio at the end of the 19th century. He came from a village outside Gersheim, which is now in the German state of Saarland, near the border with France. The name Schoendorf has a number of features that are very typical of German names. Words and names are often long and complex in German. However, by breaking words into their parts it can be easy to discover the meaning of a name. In turn, this my give clues to the origins of your family.

The name Schoendorf can be easily broken into two parts. The first part of the name comes from the adjective schön, meaning "beautiful". The second part of the name is the German word Dorf, which means "village". It is a common element in many German place names, perhaps most famously in the city of Düsseldorf. And, because it is common in place names, it has also become common in surnames, as in the name of the founder of Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York. Together, the meaning of Schoendorf is the somewhat generic "beautiful village".

The Umlaut
You may have noticed that the word for beautiful in German has the letter O with two dots written above it (ö). This character is usually referred to as an "O with umlaut". The name Schoendorf would also be written with this symbol in a German-speaking country. So, when looking in German databases, it may be necessary to type the name as "Schöndorf". When the umlaut character is unavailable, instead of simply dropping the two dots, the letter is written with a following E. This is also a very common convention that has been followed by many German immigrants when adapting names. For example, the very common German name of Müller is often found as Mueller. If you have a name, which you think is German, that has vowels "oe", "ue" and "ae", you may want to consider substituting these vowel pairs for the vowel with umlaut, "ö", "ü" and "ä". You may find something new this way. If you are going to type these characters a lot, you may want to look into the keyboards settings on your computer. If not, it is easy to produce these symbols in Microsoft Word. Simply type ctrl + shift + ; and then type the desired vowel. You can then copy and paste where needed.

Surname Saturday - Gardahaut

One of the ironies of my own research is that the great-grandparent who I knew the best is the one whose ancestry I know the least about. Suzanne Jeanne Gardahaut was born on Nov. 9, 1900 in Nantes, France and lived actively into her nineties. She was my one connection to something exotic in my own family background. Not only was she French, but she was something more, she was a Breton, from the culturally distinct region of Brittany in northwest France. This fascinated me, largely because it was something that made me feel unique. When it came time to make a display for French night, I proudly did it on Brittany. When I had the chance, I even took a course on Breton, the wonderful Celtic language of Brittany, which is related to Welsh and Cornish.

Along with this unusual heritage (at least where I lived), she also had an unusual surname. The name is absent from US Census (my great-grandmother married soon after she immigrated and is listed under her husband's name). The only historical record for the name on FamilySearch.org is my great-grandmother's ship record. The only place left to look is in France. One useful tool is the La France de noms on the genealogie.com website which can give you an idea of the distribution of surnames in France. The Gardahauts, few that there are, are clustered in or near Brittany in the northwest corner of France on the map for the period 1891-1915.

The meaning of the names is fairly obscure. One theory put forward on the GeneaNet (here) holds that the name is from the phrase garde à eau referring to a reservoir or mill race or is related to a place name Gardehaut in Côtes d'Armor. The evidence seems mainly speculative in either case.

Surname Saturday - Simpson

Beside names which reflect place names (here) and occupations (here), a third very common source of surnames are partronymics, names which originally indicated the father of the name's bearer. These types of surnames often incorporate the word for son (or in some cases daughter) and are common in many languages. In some languages, like Icelandic, patronymics are still productive. For example Icelandic politician Björn Bjarnsson is the son of former Primer Minister Bjarni Benediktsson. The son's last name is determined by father's first name. In many other languages, including English, the patronymics have been fossilized and are passed like any surname from a father to his children.

In English, there are two basic types of surnames derived from patronymics, those ending in -s (Williams, Adams, Roberts, Rogers) and those ending in -son (Williamson, Robertson, Johnson, Jackson). The forms with -son are most common in areas where there was earlier a strong Norse or Scandinavian presence, such as Northeast England and the Scottish Lowlands. In the United States, names ending in -son are often associated with the Scotch-Irish. Many of the Scotch-Irish lived in these parts of Great Britain before they settled in Northern Ireland and eventually moved onto the United States where they formed a large part of the early frontier states, like Tennessee. My own Scotch-Irish Simpson ancestors made their way from North Carolina, settling in Cannon County, Tennessee for the first half of the nineteenth century, then briefly in Lawrence County, Missouri, then moving to Lawrence County, Arkansas, and finally to Washington State.

The name Simpson is clearly patronymic in origin, but the meaning of the parts is not obvious. First, the given name included in this surname is an unfamiliar shortened form of the name Simon. Like surnames derived from place names, surnames derived from surnames may retain archaic forms that reflect an earlier stage of a language. The name is literally "Sim's son".

Whence the /p/?
This brings us to the second problem, where the /p/ in the name comes from. This is where the linguistics comes in. The /p/ is the result of a common process that occurs when certain kinds of sounds come together. In the case of Simpson, there is an /m/ followed by an /s/. The sound /m/ is called a nasal sound. This means that the sound is produced by lowering the soft palate and allowing the air to flow through the nasal cavity. If you make an /m/ or /n/ sound you can feel the air coming out your nose. The /s/ is an oral sound, meaning the air is flowing through the mouth. The /p/ emerges because of the timing of these two sounds. Notice that the /m/ and /p/ are both made by pressing the lips together. First, the lips are closed and the soft palate is lowered to make an /m/ sound. Then, the soft palate is raised closing off the nasal cavity, the pressure behind the lips builds up, the lips are opened creating a /p/ sound and then the tongue goes into position allowing enough air to pass through to make an /s/ sound. Thus, we have a new sound creeping into many words.

The same processes is also found in many other surnames, such as Thompson "Thom's son", Sampson "Sam's son", Hampson, Lampson, Hampton, Hampstead, etc. Sounds like /p/ which are not original may not occur in every spelling of a name, especially in older documents and inscriptions. There can be a lot of variation in spelling, including with and without the /p/. This is important especially when using the Soundex system, because Simpson (S512) and Simson (S525) will have different codes.

Surname Saturday - Bergmann

Some names require a lot of digging to discover their meaning or origin. Surnames derived from place names often fall into this class as they can reflect the entire history of a region. English place names come from every period of its history, with many having obscure Celtic or even pre-Celtic origins. Other surnames have very transparent meanings. Bergmann is one such name. The name consists of two parts berg and mann which in German translate to "mountain" and "man", respectively. As a compound, the term is used for "miner", possibly offering a clue to your ancestors' occupation. Berg is also a common element in many German place names (Königsberg, Nürnberg) and can easily be confused with burg "fortress" (discussed here). This confusion is particularly common for English speakers who do not distinguish between short vowels /i, u, e/ followed by /r/ and thus pronounce burg and berg the same way.

Besides German, these same elements are also common in other Germanic languages. Berg also means "mountain" in Dutch and Swedish, while Danish has bjerg. The name Bergman without double /n/ is also a common Swedish surname, as with the director Ingmar Bergman and the actress Ingrid Bergman.

Surname Saturday - Kingsbury

Every Saturday I will publish a brief comment about a different surname. For the first of this regular feature, I will start close to home with my own middle name.

The name Kingsbury is an English name which reflects English's Germanic roots. My own ancestors and those of most American Kingsburys settled in New England during the Great Migration. Like many other surnames it was originally a place name. The second part of the name bury reflects the old English word burh meaning "an enclosed or fortified place". The name Kingsbury would then mean "the fortified place of the King". The ending bury is also found in many English place names, such as Canterbury and Salisbury and as a result surnames. Related endings are also found in other Germanic languages, such as burg in German (Hamburg) or borg in Scandinavian languages (Göteborg).