Whats the diference between the last name gonzales and gonzalez?

Question

Why does one have a s and another a z?

Answer 1

Gonzalez
Spanish (González): patronymic from the personal name Gonzalo, a personal name of Visigothic origin, based on the Germanic element gunþ ‘battle’. Compare Portuguese Gonçalves (see Goncalves).
Gonzales
Variant of Spanish González (see Gonzalez).

Answer 2

This Site Might Help You.

RE:
Whats the diference between the last name gonzales and gonzalez?
Why does one have a s and another a z?

Answer 3

Gonzales Origin

Answer 4

Well, itsjustme is correct in that González is a Spanish surname of Visigothic origin. The ez suffix means son of. In Portugal you see an es suffix meaning the same thing. The Spanish surname Suárez and the Portuguese surname Soáres are the same surname, like Jensen in Danish and Johnson in English.

In most of Spain the letter Z is pronounced the same as the hard TH in the English word think. But, in the American Spanish accents the Z is pronounced the same as S.
When people are not sure how to spell things and the Spanish language in the Americas is mostly, but not completly, phonetic spelling modifications arise.

While the es suffix is usually Portuguese in the case of Gonzales I am inclined to believe that someone did not know how to spell his surname and spelled , or had it spelled for him, Gonzales. I live in Mexico and have seen many cases of Gomes, Gutierres,Lopes and Gonzales and others instead of Gómez,Gutiérrez,López and González and the Portuguese influence here is negligible at best.

Another possibility is that when they entered the USA the immigration officer did not know how to spell González and his best guess was Gonzales.

Answer 5

Names have a way of changing the way they are spelled over the years and by what areas the people live in. Many people didn't know how to spell their own last names when the census taker came around.

Answer 6

I was wondering thanks for the clarification my last name is gonzales by the way, and its been a on going joke with me. The joke being "oh i spell it with a s instead of a z, yeah i know im not really mexican"

Answer 7

gonsales is s on the last letter
gonzales is another different the last letter is z that meens last letter in the alphabets

Answer 8

because it's spelled phonetically, and just preference. that's what I've been told anyway. Just like the b/v thing

Answer 9

Below is an interesting explanation of the "ez" ending meaning "son of" and the sound of the 'z' and 's' which may help explain the reason for the difference.

I normally don't use Wikipedia as a source, but this explanation seems consistent with ones I have heard before on this topic. It can be found under the entry "Spanish Naming Customs" at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_name

See the portion of the entry which applies to your question below.
-----------------------------------------------

In Spanish, most surnames ending in "-ez" originated as patronymics. Thus "López" originally meant "son of Lope", "Fernández" meant "son of Fernando", "Ramírez" meant "son of Ramiro", "González" meant "son of Gonzalo","Núñez" meant "son of Nuño", etc. Other common examples of this are "Hernández" (from Hernando, a variant of "Ferdinand" / "Fernando"), "Rodríguez" (from "Rodrigo"), "Sánchez" (from "Sancho"), "Martínez" (from "Martín"), and "Álvarez" (from "Álvaro"). Not all last names in -ez have this origin, however. Because the Spanish letter "z" is pronounced identically to the letter "s" in parts of Andalusia and in all of Spanish America (or about 9/10 of the Spanish-speaking world), one finds Spanish America spellings such as "Chávez" (e.g. Hugo Chávez), "Cortez" (e.g. Alberto Cortez) and Valdez (e.g. Juan Valdez), which are not patronymics and which traditionally were (and in Spain still are) always spelled "Chaves" (e.g. Manuel Chaves), "Cortés" (e.g. "Hernán Cortés") and Valdés (e.g. Víctor Valdés). The new spellings were no doubt created by analogy with the large number of last names in -ez.

After the recognition of co-official languages in Spain, the law allowed the translation or respelling of names to the official languages.
---------------------------

For the record immigration officials did not change spellings. This is an urban legend of sorts and just doesn't seem to die. Manifests were completed prior to entry to the U.S. and immigration officials just checked off names as listed on the manifests that they received.

Answer 10

think one is s from mexico and one from cuba or spain