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What's in a Name? Surnames
The History of Surnames
The acquisition of surnames in Europe during the past eight hundred years has been affected by many factors, including social class and social structure, naming practices in neighbouring cultures, and indigenous cultural tradition. On the whole, the richer and more powerful classes tended to acquire surnames earlier than the working classes and the poor, while surnames were quicker to catch on in urban areas than in more sparsely populated rural areas. These facts suggest that the origin of surnames is associated with the emergence of bureaucracies. As long as land tenure military service and fealty were matters of direct relationship between a lord and his vassals, the need did not arise for fixed distinguishing epithets to mark out one carl from another. But as societies became more complex, and as such matters as the management of tenure and in particular the collection of taxes were delegated to special functionaries, it became imperative to have a more complex system of nomenclature to distinguish one individual from another reliably and unambiguously.
Even after hereditary surnames were adopted, there was considerable variation. Hereditary surnames tended to coexist with more or less noticeable vestiges of patronymic systems. A child would know not only his surname, derived from his father, but also his lineage. Choice of the masculine possessive in the preceding sentence ('his father', 'his lineage') is a reminder that in European cultures surnames have mostly been handed down from father to son, with women adopting the surname of the husband on marriage. The notion of free choice between adopting the mother's or the father's surname is a recent phenomenon, although it is now enshrined in the law in Denmark.
The bulk of European surnames in countries such a England and France were formed in the 13th and 14th centuries. The process started earlier and continued in some places into the 19th century, but the norm is that in the 11th century people did not have surnames, whereas by the 15th century they did.
In Ireland, surnames developed naturally out of a more ancient system of clan and sept names. These were themselves originally patronymic, but stretched back over a thousand years, so that by the 12th century a 'son of Murchadha' in Ireland could be many generations removed from the original bearer of the given name Murchadha. This system could in fact be regarded as an early version of a system of surnames. It was gradually incorporated into the system that was introduced into Ireland by the Normans and, later, the English.
At the other end of the time scale lies Scandinavia, the region that has been to the last to abandon patronymics in favour of hereditary surnames. Surnaming crept northwards from Germany through Denmark and into Norway in the 15th and 16th centuries. In Iceland, the traditional patronymic naming system has still not fully given way to hereditary surnames. Magnus Pálsson is Magnus son of Pál, and his eldest son may well be called Pál Magnusson, preserving a traditional alternation that in some families goes back over a thousand years. His daughter would be called, for example, Gudrun Magnusdottir. The patronymic naming system still found in Iceland was common throughout Scandinavia until about two hundred years ago, and Swedish family histories still contain anecdotes about the incredulity and derision met by women who first called themselves Anna Andersson rather than Anna Andersdotter.
Over the centuries, most people in Europe have accepted their surname as a fact of life, however much the individual may dislike the name or even suffer ridicule as a result of unpleasant connotations associated with it. Mechanisms exist in most countries for official alteration of one's surname, but they are employed quite rarely in Europe. Alteration by personal choice is a much more common phenomenon in America, where each year many thousands of Americans choose to change their surname officially. A more common source of variation is in fact involuntary official change, in other words, clerical error.
Among the humbler classes of European society, and especially among illiterate people, individuals were willing to accept the mistakes of officials, clerks, and priests as officially bestowing a new version of their surname, just as they had meekly accepted the surname they were born with. In North America, the linguistic problems confronting immigration officials at Ellis Island in the 19th century were legendary as a prolific source of Anglicization. In the United States such processes of official and accidental change caused Bauch to become Baugh, Micsza to become McShea, Siminowicz to become Simmons, and so on. Many immigrants deliberately Anglicized or translated their surnames on arrival in the New World, so that Schwarz became Black. These examples illustrate three of the main strands in Anglicization: phonetic assimilation to an unrelated names, phonetic assimilation to an unrelated name, phonetic assimilation to a cognate existing name or word, and straightforward translation of the vocabulary element, with no phonetic influences. A further feature is arbitrary adoption of an existing American name, with little or no apparent connection with the original name, as when Chiariglione became Flynn or when Fishbein became Sullivan.
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