Shakespeare said that.
Today I want to talk about names, last names to be specific. I will give you a couple of examples from my own history that will lead you, hopefully not by the nose, into a little light reading meant to take your mind off being quarantined lo, these many days.
When Mrs. RWP's father arrived in Boston from Italy in 1917, his name was Dhimitri Kuçi, but on his grave marker in Florida it is James Cudse. His passport was Italian but he himself was from Albania. How his name got changed is a mystery. My theory is that somebody along the way -- an immigration official, an employer, a naturalization know-it-all, a friend -- suggested it as a way of dispensing with the cedilla. My future father-in-law, an easy-going sort of guy, went along with it. Nobody seems to know for sure. That still doesn't explain how the K became a C.
His wife's name was Ksanthipi in Albania (not unlike the Greek woman named Xanthippe who was the wife of Socrates) but her grave marker says Carrie. Go figure.
If you had asked my dad (non-bio) what kind of name Brague was, he would have said "Welsh" without hesitation and trotted out the family lore story, unproven, of seven brothers who came to the United States from Wales and all but one of whom moved on to Australia. This story is apocryphal at best. I always said, "Dad, with that -gue ending the name has to be French; it probably came over to the British Isles after the Norman Conquest" (which, if you didn't know, occurred in 1066 when William the Conqueror defeated Harold at the Battle of Hastings).
My mother was a Silberman although it may have been Silbermann back in Germany, but it was never Silverman. My mother said (I don't know whether it is accurate) that Silberman was a German Jewish name and Silverman was Russian. In America, people always get the two names mixed up. I have said on many occasions, "Silberman, with a B, not a V" and it is darned irritating to have to do so. In fact, when I was doing family research using the 1940 census, one of my mother's brothers had completely disappeared. I found his family (Sol, Naomi, Joan, and Eileen) in the right town but spelled the other way, with a V instead of a B, by a none-too-attentive census-taker. Back in those days, census takers went house to house with a big book and wrote everything down in it themselves. None of this do-it-yourself, mail it in stuff.
Longtime readers of this blog may remember reading about the Brague River in southeastern France or the Château de Brague winery in the Bordeaux region of western France. Both of these examples bolster my theory if only in my own mind. I suppose that in Europe my surname rhymes with Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia (if there still were a Czechoslovakia), but here in the good old U. S. of A. it has always rhymed with, well, you know what.
Anyhoo, all of that is neither here nor there, except as a lead-in to the article I now present for your entertainment and reading edification:
Why 40% of Vietnamese People Have the Same Last Name
So if the readers of this blog were Vietnamese they might be Adrian Nguyen, Rachel Nguyen, Pam Nguyen, Bonnie Nguyen, Kathy Nguyen, Graham Nguyen, Red Nguyen, Sue Nguyen, Ian Nguyen, Kylie Nguyen, Michelle Nguyen, Tasker Nguyen, and Ho Chi Pudding.
Until next time, as they say in Ethiopia: Abyssinia.
One of my wider ancestral names is Penistone - quite common in Yorkshire. There is also a town of that name, not far from where I now live. However, I had some difficulty in researching that branch of my family history because when the Church of JCLDS transcribed the church registers and made records of baptisms, marriages and deaths available on ancestry.com, many of them appear as Penestone, Panistone, Pennistone and even Kenistone: anything other than Penistone. Why would that be? Tasker Nguyen.
ReplyDeleteI have no idea but my niece lives in Penistone. Irrelevant but true.
DeleteTasker, my guess is that the C of JC of LDS, having a squeaky clean image and all, were reluctant to write the word penis or, if they did write it, would have to perform ritual cleansing afterward. Or maybe, as Bonnie points out in a later comment, the spelling was not standard in earlier times. Or maybe the transcribers couldn't read the handwriting in the church registers. You now have three very reasonable possibilities as to why.
DeleteOh - so that's why! It isn't a name change, it is correct in the original sources and mostly perfectly clear. It looks like someone did a global substitute to the transcriptions.
DeleteYou bring up an interesting subject. I've done a little genealogy research and also use ancestry.com and I have discovered that it is very common to see changes in names through the years for very simple reasons. Hundreds of years ago not everyone was able to read and write or even if they did their spelling was not so good. Names would be added to church records, census reports and travel records based on the way they were pronounced to the person filling out the records. Not all pronunciations sound the same and not all people used the same spelling. This alone caused many changes in names especially as people began to travel to other parts of the world. I have a similar situation in my family. A large part of my family has the surname Hardgrave. We know this branch of the family comes from Great Britain as we have traced them. But when we make the jump back in time the name Hardgrave becomes Hargrave or even Hargreaves or something similar. I imagine that in the ship's records in traveling to our country the letter "d" simply got added unintentionally. Similar things have happened to many other names.
ReplyDeleteI worked many years with a Vietnamese doctor. (her name was not Nquyen) I learned from her that the woman does not take on the husband's last name so there would be different last names in one family unit. I will say quite a few of her patients were Nguyens!
Bonnie, plus there's the fact that spelling didn't begin to be standardized (or standardised if you're English) until after the two great dictionaries were compiled, Samuel Johnson's in the 1750s in the U.K. and Noah Webster's in the 1820s in the U.S.
DeleteI have wondered at times if the French painter and sculptor Georges Braque (with a Q, not a G) and I are related because of the very point you make. And all the people whose name is Bragg, what about them? It makes one's head swim.
In Mexico and Spain the wife's surname is added to the husband's, as in Pedro Garcia y Gonzales.
I find it all extremely fascinating. Frustrating at times, but fascinating nonetheless.
The immigrations staff had a challenge with different languages so there were some weird situations. We had a chinese guy called Ollie Olson. He knew what happened so that he got that name.
ReplyDeleteBut will we ever know? Red, please elaborate! You left us hanging.
DeleteMy father used to say Abyssinia like that. I hadn't thought of it until now. He died 50 years ago but you have given me a pleasant mental picture of him this morning. I have not bothered with genealogy because it has never interested me, just a list of names that might as well be plucked from thin air for all the information it would give me.
ReplyDeleteRachel, I'm glad I stirred up pleasant memories for you. They are much better than the other kind.
DeleteI have a little tale about surnames that I wish to share with you. In 1991 I visited Iceland. It has a very small population and in the country's thin phonebook, everybody was listed alphabetically but by first names - not by surnames. If you were Icelandic your son's last name would be Robertsson and your daughter would be Robertsdottir. Over there surnames don't mean a lot.
ReplyDeleteLời chào,
Ho Chi (or Ho for short) Pudding
Neil, I knew that about Icelandic names. The Russians do the same thing (-ovich for boys and -yeva for girls) and perhaps the Polish.
DeleteThe researchers of the future will have a chaotic time if they are using family names and making an assumption that the wife takes on the husband's surname. My son's surname is Edwards. His wife's surname is Macrae. Their child's surname is Edwards Macrae. I have a niece (not the one in Penistone) whose husband took her surname.
ReplyDeleteAs an aside it was apparently usual in 'the old days' (whenever they were) for men in Scotland to take on the wife's family name.
You'll have to excuse me but at the moment the sun is shining so Vietnamese surnames will have to wait. This sunny weather is very unusual here and the garden need me.
Graham, I have a good friend in Stockholm who took on his wife's surname because his was very common and hers wasn't.
DeleteA former pastor of ours merged surnames with his wife when they married, but hers comes first and its hyphenated (Larocca-Pitts).
I do hope you will go back and read about the Vietnamese surnames.
Fun history on names. So Kuci became Cudse.
ReplyDeleteI tried to research my Daddy's name, and I was only able to go back to the American Revolution. I think the spelling changed so it is a mystery. I'm not knowledgeable enough about research to go back further.