The How and Where of Surname Searching
Finding information on the particular last name you are looking for can sometimes be difficult, especially if you are searching older records, since surnames evolve and change over time. The reasons are numerous—early on, illiteracy could have played a major role, where people may not have known the ‘correct’ spelling of their surname.
Upon immigration, people may have voluntarily or involuntarily Americanized their names because they wanted to fit in or start afresh, or because their names were mispronounced or contained letters not in the English alphabet. Other reasons are clerical. Transcripts from old records may mistake letters that are hard to distinguish, or census-takers may misspell a person’s name.
Getting Into the Details of Surnames
As such, an important key in searching for surnames is to try multiple variations of a single name. Some tips include changing vowels to alternate ones, adding silent letters (such as E, Y, or H), or adding an ‘S’ at the end. It is also helpful to consider misspellings of the surname, such as the addition or subtraction of double letters, transposition of letters, and mistakes in similar-appearing letters.
But how to find genealogy information on your particular ‘Smith’ or your particular ‘Johnson?’ Another challenge in surname search is to find the relevant information for the particular individual you are searching for, especially if they have common surnames.
Providing key details in your search, such as location or period, will help narrow your search. You also want to make sure you find genealogy information, not information on ‘brownies’ and ‘brown paint’ if your surname is Brown. To do so, you can add relevant terms such as ‘genealogy’ or ‘family history’ to your search, or you can start your search in genealogy-related directories or public records searches .
What’s in a name? Origins of Surnames
Strange as it may seem, at some point in any family tree there comes a time when surnames disappear. Surnames are names that have been passed on through families, but they have only been around for the last 1000 or so years, and only started being widely used since the Middle Ages. They came to be used when more than just a given name was needed to distinguish one another: between Jack from the meadow, Jack the shepherd, and Jack with that strong arm.
Where do surnames come from? Some are very obvious—take ‘Hunter,’ for example. Hunter is one of the many surnames that began as a description of someone’s occupation, like Miller, Smith, or Fletcher. Some occupational surnames aren’t as obvious, however, such as Crowner (Coroner). Others are patronymic, meaning that they come from the father’s name, like Williamson. Names that begin with ‘Mac,’ ‘O,’ and ‘Fitz’ are also patronymic surnames, such as O’Brien. Finally, some last names describe a location, such as ‘Woods’ or ‘England.’
So perhaps when you’re tired of searching for and documenting genealogy information using the surname search techniques, or if you’re simply curious, it might be interesting to find out the original meanings of the surnames you’ve come across in your family tree. There are many online resources, such as the one at Family Education, which allow you to search for the meanings of a given surname. With a couple of seconds of typing, you might find interesting surname meanings to complement your family tree history.
