I notice many people have family names that end with ..mann, or ..son, where did these names come from?

Answer 1

It comes from using the fathers first name and then adding son.
Ex: John would become Johnson


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Answer 2

Ok, many of these names like Pittmann came from the professions of ancestors. Example: In colonial days it took two people to run a saw. There was one person on top of a piece of wood to push the saw down through the wood and there was a person on the bottom, or in the pitt to push the saw back up again. The person on top was called a Sawyer and the one on bottom was a Pittman. The names stuck.
As for ...son, It's a different story. Here's an example: The name Johnson. Somewhere back in the old days someone named John had a son. The child became known as John's son. or Johnson. That stuck too.

Answer 3

Last names used to be a description of the person. Last names that ended in -son meant "(_____)'s son". For example, take Leif Erickkson. His last name means "Erik's son", and his father happens to be Erik the Red.
As for -mann, it too would have been part of a description of the person, but I dare not jump to conclusions. Mann could easily mean something different in another language.

Answer 4

I would guess that names ending with ..son are of Scandinavian origin. As you probably know already, the Scandinavian countries used not to use surnames so a name with the name of Geir, who was the son of Gunnar, would be known as Geir Gunnarson. If Geir's son was called Morten, the child's name would be Morten Geirsson. You get the picture.

Except for Iceland, the rest of the Nordic lands went over to the European system of family names. In Norway, the surnames tended to be more place names but you still get plenty of Ericssons in Sweden.

Mann, I an not so sure of, but its sounds Germanic to me. For instance in the name of Hartmann, so in may be of Saxon origin.

Addition: W W D. Good point but not quite accurate. If you re-read my statement, you see I did not consign the tradition to the Icelandic past.

Answer 5

You already have some good answers here, but they all give the impression that these naming systems are completely in the past. In modern Iceland, as an example, you'll still find "so-an-so's-dottir" (daughter) or so-and-so'son" surnames.