Surname

“ A bastard has precisely as little right to the surname of its mother as it has to the surname of its father. Obviously, however, under the customs of our present social life, every person must have a surname of one kind or another; and it is here that the anomaly in the British law exists, inasmuch as neither statute nor canon law provide any means for conferring a surname. ”

“ It has not been thought necessary to refer by number to several of the books of reference of which I have made constant use.
The lives are arranged alphabetically according to the surnames. Where there is a near relationship between persons of the same surname, they are placed in genealogical order. ”

“ A child shall succeed his or her father’s surname and origin of sur- name: Provided, That when the parents agree to have the child assume his or her mother’s surname and origin of surname at the time of filing a report on their marriage, he or she shall succeed the mother’s sur- name and origin of surname. (2) Where the father is a foreigner, the child may succeed the mother’s surname and origin of surname. (3) A child whose father is not known shall assume the mother’s sur- name and origin of surname. ”

“ That the King has the prerogative, and exercises it, of conferring or confirming surnames is, of course, unquestioned, but it is hardly to be supposed that the King will trouble himself to provide a surname for every illegitimate child which may be born ”

“ Most people nowadays have one or more Christian names and a surname, but this was not always the case. Every Christian from the earliest days of Christianity must have had a Christian name given to him at baptism. And before the days of Christianity every man, woman, or child must have had some name. But the practice of giving surnames grew up only very gradually in the countries of Europe. ”

“ It is a general custom among all these nations not to have any special family names, titles, or surnames; using, as I have before said, but one appellation. Now, besides the Christian name, Juan or Pedro, they use as a surname that which the mother gives them at birth—although there are mothers so Christian and civilized that they will not use this latter name, but prefer that both Christian name and surname be conferred in baptism; this we often do. ”

“ In Europe, where titles and property are inherited by male children, under the laws of entail and primogeniture, a legal significance attaches to the line of the surname, and to most Americans this line is of special interest. Nevertheless, it often happens that our ancestry along this line is less brilliant than along some of the other lines. In that case we will not do full justice to our surname until we reveal the glory of the sturdy stocks which our ancestors had the good sense to engraft upon our line by marriage. ”

“ Nothing could be more natural than that children should often pass current in the community in which they lived as the sons of ‘Thomas,’ or ‘William,’ or ‘Richard,’ or ‘John;’ and that these several relationships should be found in our directories as distinct sobriquets only shows that there was a particular generation in these families in which this title became permanent, and passed on to future descendants as an hereditary surname. ”

“ A limitation more or less similar prevails in Germany and other European countries.
As regards the surname (Fr. surnom, name in addition) , custom has universally decreed that a man shall be known by the name of his father. But in England and the United States, at least, this custom is not legally binding; there is no law preventing man from taking whatever name he has a fancy for, nor are there any particular formalities required to be observed on adopting a fresh surname ”

“ The majority derive their origin from places or districts of limited dimensions, and to enumerate them would be an interminable and very thankless task. MR. L. has therefore judiciously determined to exercise his discretion on this class of cases. Nor are the names derived from Christian names generally worth insertion, for every Christian name has, in some form, been converted into a surname, either with or without alteration. ”

“ Every social casualty had an effect upon our names which it could not have upon our words. The names found in Domesday Book, casting aside the new importation, were, in the great majority of cases, obsolete by the end of the twelfth century, and of those which have survived and descended to us as surnames, well-nigh all are devoid of diminutive or patronymic desinences—a clear proof that they were utterly out of fashion as personal names during the era of surname formation. The Norman invasion was not a conquest of our language, but it was of our nomenclature. ”

“ Some, once so popular that they scarce gave identity to the bearer, are now all but obsolete, while numerous appellations at present generally current were then utterly unknown. There are surnames familiar to our ears whose root as a Christian name is now passed out of knowledge; while, on the other hand, many a Christian name now daily upon our lips has no surname formed from it to tell of any lengthened existence. The fact is, that while our surnames, putting immigration aside, have been long at a standstill, we have ever been and are still adding to our stock of baptismal names. ”

“ In no way does advancement in age and dignity show itself sooner than in the substitution of the surname for the Christian name. The boy shows his sense of growing importance by dropping the Christian name in addressing his companions. ”

“ A surname, in short, may be called a matter of convenience; a Christian name, a matter of necessity. The giving two Christian names at baptism did not come generally into use till, owing to the multiplication of the patronymic, a single Christian name became insufficient to identify the individual. Consequently an instance of a double Christian name, previous to the commencement of the eighteenth century, is a rarity. ”

“ But Scott, as a man's name, is, not to say older than the introduction of surnames, but as old probably as the name of the nation itself. To begin with England, it occurs in the thirteenth century, in the Liber Vitæ, where it is the reverse of a surname, Scott Agumdessune (no doubt for Agemundessune) . ”

“ Even a casual examination of the family names of men discloses the fact that many of the most common must have originated in the adoption, by an individual, of the name of his occupation as a surname, to distinguish him from other men of the same given name. ”

“ The fact that, with but one or two exceptions, the usual pet addenda, ‘kin,’ ‘cock,’ and ‘ot,’ or ‘et,’ are absolutely wanting, or even the patronymic ‘son,’ shows decisively that they cannot be numbered among what we must call the popular names of the period. Introduced here and there in the community at large, they struggled on for bare existence, and have descended to us as surnames in their simple and unaltered form. ”

“ In order to avoid the use of people's own names, parents are sometimes named after their children, uncles and aunts after their nephews and nieces, and so forth. The common custom of naming parents after their children seems to arise from a reluctance to mention the real names of persons addressed or directly referred to. When it is deemed necessary that a man's real name should be kept secret, it is often customary, as we have seen, to call him by a surname or nickname. ”

“ Webb continued,
"One thousand dollars a year may easily compensate for an ugly name; and even if we do not choose to give the child a middle name, which is optional with us, she will not have to be called by her Christian name long; for after a girl is in her teens, she gets the title of her surname. ”

“ Clients and freedmen took the gentile name of their patron, and when the freedom of Rome was granted to a stranger, he took the gentile name of him from whom it was received, thus infinitely spreading the more distinguished nomina of the later republic and early empire, and in the Romanized countries gradually becoming the modern hereditary surname, the convenience of the family distinction 129causing it to be gradually adopted by the rest of the world. ”

“ The study of the origin of family names is at the same time quite simple and very difficult. Its simplicity consists in the fact that surnames can only come into existence in certain well-understood ways. Its difficulty is due to the extraordinary perversions which names undergo in common speech, to the orthographic uncertainty of our ancestors, to the frequent coalescence of two or more names of quite different Origin, and to the multitudinous forms which one single name can assume, such forms being due to local pronunciation, accidents of spelling, date of adoption, and many minor causes. ”

“ It is a peculiarity among them to address one another by the Christian name, or to speak of a man by the Christian name along with the surname, should there be need to distinguish him from another. The term "Mr." is rarely employed. ”

“ It is not perhaps an unlikely conjecture that at the period when surnames were first ordered to be made hereditary, some families went back several generations to select an illustrious ancestor on whom to build themselves a name. ”

“ By means of family names former connections are kept up, and the past is associated with the present. Even we ourselves are generally more disposed to count kin with distant relatives having our own surname than with those having another. ”

“ With many families it is a convenient custom to christen the sons by the mother’s maiden name in addition to their first individual name; but the whole conversion of surnames into Christian names is exclusively English, and is impossible on the Continent, as state and church both refuse to register what is not recognized as in use. Of English surnames we need say nothing; they have been fully treated of in other works, and as any one may be used in baptism, at any time, the mention of them would be endless. ”

“ So I take it for granted that your future name will be beyond the reach of æsthetic criticism. It ought to be a single syllable name, of course, so as to go rightly with Alexa. Christian names of two or three syllables should always be followed by a surname of one. ”

“ Before, however, we enter into the history of these, and with regard to England that is the purpose of this book, it will be well to take a brief survey of the actual state of human nomenclature in preceding times. Surnames, we must remember, were the simple result of necessity when population, hitherto isolated and small, became so increased as to necessitate further particularity than the merely personal one could supply. ”

“ Well, he probably will know it in the case of the latest of his ancestors, say, his father or grandfather, and let him work from that point. Failing this, a study of the family names in each district should reveal the secret.
The surname itself, especially if the searcher has been able to trace the ancestry some way back, should be carefully noted with regard to the different forms in which it may appear, for in early days there was a quite delightful variation in the spelling of names ”

“ PATRONYMIC SURNAMES. It is impossible to say how important an influence have merely personal names exercised upon our nomenclature. The most familiar surnames we can meet with, saving that of ‘Smith,’ are to be found in this list. For frequency we have no names to be compared with ‘Jones,’ or ‘Williamson,’ or ‘Thompson,’ or ‘Richardson.’ How they came into being is easily manifest. ”

“ But there is another class of surnames we may fitly introduce here, which, I doubt not, forms no small proportion in the aggregate mass of our nomenclature—that of sign-names. We in a cultivated age like that of the present fail, as we must, to realize the effect of these latter upon the current life of our forefathers. ”

“ The instances, however, exhibited below, prove that such custom was not, at any rate, universally prevalent at that time amongst us. And, indeed, whatever might have been the case in reference to "the high men of the lond," it is very certain that surnames, properly so called, were not completely adopted by the mass of the people until the close of the fourteenth century. ”

“ Again, these complications are caused by the assumption of surnames other than those originally belonging to the persons assuming them, by the creation of special limitations in the grant of a title; by the confounding of names with titles, or those of peerage with those borne by courtesy; by the growth of peerages which, as it were, sprout from some great House already ennobled; and lastly, by the distinctions which exist with regard to peers of the United Kingdom, of Great Britain, of England, or of Ireland. ”

“ Greek or Roman-Greek, names. The present fashions in nomenclature are, however, best explained in the following letter from an English lady residing in Russia:—
'Children (and grown-up persons in their own family) are, I may say, universally called by their diminutives. In society the Christian name and patronymic are made use of, and you seldom hear a person addressed by his family name, though he may be spoken of in the third person as “Romanoff,” or “Romanova” (surnames take the gender and number of their bearers) , except by his superiors, such as a general to his young officers, &c. ”

“ In Scotland and in the north of England, the paternal grandfather and grandmother have namesakes in the eldest son and daughter, then comes the turn of the grand-parents on the mother’s side, then of the parents themselves, after which fancy may step in. In Germany the same practice prevails as regards the two eldest; and likewise in the south of France, where the child, whatever its sex, bears the grandfather’s name, thus accounting for various uncouth feminines; but though thus christened, the two eldest children are never so called, but always by the diminutive of their surname. ”