Who invented surnames or family names? Name some of the world's oldest surnames that are still in use.?

Answer 1

A long long long time ago people's last names came from their profession. My last name is Gaither and someone told me that the name is English and it was for Gate Keeper back in the day. Probably something like Smith came from a Black Smith profession.

Answer 2

Surnames come from the persons parentage, as in Johnson or from an occupation like Cooper, which used to be a person who made barrels.

The earliest my family's name, Fielding, can be traced is the 1700 in England and before that the Netherlands. The Kennedy's I have read about in King David the 2nds court in 1232

Answer 3

As the population got bigger, they needed surnames to tell which John was which (most first names came from the Bible, so they were very limited). Some surnames were for your profession, like Baker. Some were for the way you looked, like Long or Stout. Others used their father's name. William, the son of John, would now be William Johnson.

Answer 4

According to Wikipedia, the inventor is unknown, and most people in Europe did not have surnames until the 12th century. Furthermore, "one of the most accepted theories for the origin of surname use attributes their introduction to the Normans and the Domesday Book of 1086. The use of surnames gradually became an accepted practice throughout Western Europe in the Middle Ages. In parts of the world, family names did not appear in common use until the 17th to 19th centuries, and they are unused in some cultures even today."

Surnames were adopted at different times in different places. For example, "in England hereditary surnames were adopted in the 13th and 14th centuries, initially by the aristocracy but, eventually, by everyone. By 1400, most English people and lowland Scots had acquired surnames, but many Irish, highland Scots and Welsh people did not adopt English-style surnames until the 17th century, or later."

As for which surnames are oldest, here are common types of surnames in Europe among which are probably the oldest European surnames:

* Occupations (e.g., Smith, Archer, Baker, Fisher)
* Personal characteristics (e.g., Short, Brown, Whitehead)
* Geographical features (e.g., Hill, Wood, Fields)
* Place names (e.g., London, Hamilton', Sutton, Flint)
* For those descended from land-owners, the name of their holdings, manor or estate
* Patronymics and Ancestry, often from a male's given name (e.g., Richardson, Williams, Johnson) or from a clan name (for those of Scottish origin, e.g., MacDonald, Forbes)

In China, by contrast, surnames were used by royalty prior to the 5th century BC and gradually became used by lower classes after 221 BC. Surnames like "Yao" and "Jiang" may be the oldest surnames in the world that are still in use.

Answer 5

Most all sur names came from the occupation or location of a person.

My father's family name came directly from the part of France they left when they came to French Canada in the 1600's.

Since then our family name has morphed into English/American translations of the it.

To 'compound' the issue, many French names are combinations of two names linked together with 'dit'. eg. Cholet dit LaViolette. Each individual in a family have been known to use one or the other of the names. Then each of those names have been 'Americanized'.

Try following a geneology like this!

Answer 6

The oldest surnames are probably those based on profession (Baker, Smith, Hunter) or physical description (Long, Short, Black, White). In my heritage (Scandinavian), the oldest names are those that describe a person by whose son or daughter one was (Hansen, Jensen, Jensdatter).

Answer 7

In the beggining surname was actually a father`s name like John of Michael and onde day it became John Michaels etc.

Answer 8

Most surnames came from people's jobs or where they lived.

Answer 9

The names came from locals seeking to differentiate, lets say, John, the cooper (barrel maker), from John, the smith (blacksmith), or John's son (Johnson). I once kept records in the army, and often ran across interesting names, such as Whoreknocker. Wonder what his great great great great grand father did.

Answer 10

My last name is Ritter. It means "knight" in German. During the time last names became popular, many of the noblemen in Germany took this last name.