Where do last names come from?

Question

I know last names are used to tell people apart, but who decides what last name you got and how long ago did people have last names? I mean when did someone decide that everyone should have a last name? And who got to make that decision?

Answer 1

alot of time the last names came from the business that people were in... that's why there are so many Smiths.

Sometimes the last name would come from the father's name...

if your name was John McLane... it would literally mean John son of Lane...

The "Mc" "Mac" and "O'" in Irish names comes from this....

Most African American last names came from the Slave owner that owned their ancestors...

Answer 2

Last names came about at different times and in different places.

The word surname is name prefixed by the French word sur (meaning "on"), which derives from Latin super ("over" or "above"), meaning "additional name." As early as the 14th century it was also found spelled as sirname or sirename (suggesting that it meant "man's name" or "father's name") due to folk etymology.

The use of family names varies among cultures. In particular, Icelanders, Tibetans, Burmese, and Javanese often do not use a family name — well-known people lacking a family name include U Thant (Burmese), Suharto and Sukarno (see Indonesian names), and Dilber (Uyghur, a Turkic language). Also, many royal families do not use family names.

In some cultures, a woman's family name traditionally changes upon marriage, although few countries mandate such a change. Other modern options include combining both family names, changing neither name, or creating a new name, e.g. combining letters of previous surnames or creating a pseudonym unrelated to the previous surnames.

In the 19th century, Francis Galton published a statistical study of the extinction of family names. (See Galton-Watson process for an account of some of the mathematics.)

In English-, Dutch-, German-, French- and Scandinavian-speaking countries, people often have two or more given names, and the family name goes at the end. (Occasionally a surname is called the "second name", which can be confused with a middle name.) In Spain and Hispanic areas, people have one or more given names and two family names, one from the father and one from the mother. In Italy, people may have one or more given names, no middle name, and a family name. In the Portuguese-speaking countries, people can have one or two given names and from one up to four family names taken from the father and/or from the mother.

To have a look at the different countries including English speaking, French speaking, German speaking, Dutch speaking, Belguim, Ireland, italy, Greece, Persian, Pakistan, Portugal and Brazil, Spanish Speaking, Philippines, Iceland, finland, Scandinavian, Russia, Poland, Ukraine, and many others, check out this article

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_name

I hope this answers your question. Blessings,.

Answer 3

Most probably thousands of years ago when the world started to populate they need a family name to keep track of who was who.
So they decided to take either the father trade and add it on. Like if the person was a shoe maker. That is where the name Shoemacher comes from. Macher in jewish means maker. There are many more examples. But you got the idea.

Answer 4

Here is a site the describes the orgin of family names:

http://home.att.net/~beckfoot/origin_of_family_names.htm

However for anyone who is tracing their family history, alot of family names were changed after migration to the USA. This is due mostly to pronunciation. It is somewhat controversial but some say the officers at Ellis Island would misspell the names of those coming into America because of the difficulty of the pronunciation and by law their name would remain 'misspelled' from that day forth.

Here's a site that has some takes on this:

http://genealogy.about.com/od/ellis_island/a/name_change.htm

Hope this helps!

Answer 5

Many pilgrims that came to US changed that last name to their professions. Some of these names were Baker, Carpenter, Cook, Taylor, Wood, Woods, & Miller.
Many were trying to escape peracusion & the name changes helped them blend in. Last names have been around for a long, long time. Chinese were the oldest except for the biblical names often called tribes or clans.

Answer 6

"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."

Answer 7

English

Answer 8

usually last names come from the pilgrams, like if u were a farmer, ur last name would be farmer. or if u were a blacksmith, ur last name would be smith.

Answer 9

European surnames first occurred between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, with some patronymic surnames in Scandinavia being acquired as late as the nineteenth century. Prior to this time period, particularly during the "Dark Ages" between the fifth and eleventh centuries, people were largely illiterate, lived in rural areas or small villages, and had little need of distinction beyond their given names. During Biblical times people were often referred to by their given names and the locality in which they resided such as "Jesus of Nazareth." However, as populations grew, the need to identify individuals by surnames became a necessity. The acquisition of surnames during the past eight hundred years has been affected by many factors, including social class and social structure, cultural tradition, and naming practices in neighboring cultures.

The majority of surnames are derived from patronymics, i.e. the forming of a surname from the father's given name such as Johnson, meaning literally "the son of John." In some rare cases, the naming practice was metronymic, wherin the surname was derived from the mother's give name such as Catling, Marguerite or Dyott.

Other popular methods of origin for surnames are derived from place names or geographical names such as England, occupational names such as Smith or Carpenter in the British Isles; Schmidt or Zimmerman in Germany, etc. Less popular methods of surname origins include housenames such as Rothchild, surnames derived from nicknames of physical descriptions such as Blake or Hoch, or after one's character such as Stern or Gentile. In some cases an individual was named after a bird or an animal such as Lamb for a gentile or inoffensive person, while Fox was used for a person who was cunning. Surnames were also derived from anectodotal events such as Death and Leggatt, or seasons such as Winter and Spring, and status such as Bachelor, Knight and Squire.

Surname spelling and pronunciation has evolved over centuries, with our current generation often unaware of the origin and evolution of their surnames. Among the humbler classes of European society, and especially among the illiterate, individuals had little choice but to accept the mistakes of officials, clerks, and priests who officially bestowed upon them new versions of their surnames, just as they had meekly accepted the surnames which 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, etc. Many immigrants deliberately Anglicized or changed their surnames upon arrival in the New World, so that Mlynar became Miller, Zimmerman became Carpenter, and Schwarz became Black.