Origin of Binfet?

Question

Anyone know the origins of the surname Binfet, links would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Ancestry.com lists a father and son, a Valentine Binfet (1864-1930) and Joseph Binfet (1886-1975) who immigrated to South Dakota from Russia. Does that help?

If you believe these individuals to be your family members, I (or someone else) can go back and look up US Census information.

Answer 2

The former poster showed an immigrant from Russia. Since there are 32 characters in the Russian alphabet, immigrations officials would have definitely had to innovate the spelling.

Since it is not listed with a coat of arms peddler, I won't have to give you a warning about them.

I might mention that two free sites Rootsweb and FamilySearch. org has some trees on Binfet. You can pull up Rootsweb and put Binfet in the World Connect block. You will then see the family trees. Probe on a name and it will take you to a screen where you can see the name and email address of the submitters. Now some submitters, might not know too much as the Binfet they have might just be someone who married into their family.

Now let me warn you. Be careful at taking as absolute fact anything you see in family trees on any website. There are errors. Sometimes you see different information on the same people, but frequently you see the same information on a person by different submitters. That is because people are copying and many times they are copying errors.

Answer 3

Don't worry about "immigration officials" changing surnames, they didn't, that's a myth. Immigrants came on ships with their names already written in English on the ships' passenger lists. Those are what immigration officials used.

So. If you're wanting to learn your family's origins what we all do is begin at the beginning - ourselves - ask our living elders for information then work backwards through time, history, and geography. When you need help with an ancestor come back and let us know who what when where.