HOW TO DEAL WITH SURNAME MYSTERIES #5 THOSE ETHNIC SURNAMES and LANGUAGE CHANGES

HOW TO DEAL WITH SURNAME MYSTERIES  #5 THOSE ETHNIC SURNAMES and LANGUAGE CHANGES

Sometimes when you're trying to figure out a surname, maybe it's not coming up on a database at all, you think "something is wrong here."  There is so much on the internet it is indeed rare that a surname isn't going to bring up something. 

Sometimes looking at ethnic surname lists put up by a genealogy society or study group will help.

There are very many surname lists on the Internet, many of them focus on the most common surnames, which isn't helpful if the surname is uncommon.  

Some surnames have changed or been changed and some disappeared as the lineage died out.  

As previously stated, we want to find the meaning of the name in case the person moved countries and changed the spelling of their name due to encountering a new language.  Let's give a simple example, Smith.  Smith could become Smied = the German version.  Smid in Dutch. Forgoron in French. Kovacs in Hungarian. ... (Early Scottish explorers to California during land grant days, who married women of Mexican or Spanish descent on rancheros given by the King of Spain, Spanish-ified their surnames.)

But another example of surname change is when someone adapts the spelling to the new language - English - so that native speakers won't always mispronounce it or stumble over it.  These changes are not always clear and sometimes a name was Germanized or Anglicized in unexpected ways or another person, such as a census taker, wrote the name down the way it sounded to them.  One name that I found good documentation had been changed went from Polish in Russia to German in America.  The original surname had a first syllable Spi. It got turned into Spiegel.  Often thought to be a Jewish name, Spiegel means mirror.  I've also seen it explained to mean spyglass or eyeglass - it has something to do with seeing. The people who changed their name to Spiegel were Roman Catholics.

Using a Google translator may solve the mystery of a surname. Play with the translator with various suggestions, such as German, Polish, Slovak, and see if a meaning ever comes up.  Will it be a trade guild name, an honorific, or reflect the name of a place?

When you go into documents in the 1800's and back, you may notice that the same surname sometimes has one (s) in one version and two (ss), in another. You may notice that f's are used in the place of s's.

Example:  Andrassy.  Andraffy.  Dessewffy.  Deffewffy or Dessewssy.  (Hungarian nobility.)

Y's and J's can also be interchanged... Janko - Yanko (Slovak)

W's and V's interchanged.  Wager.  Vagner.  (Germanic or Polish)

G to J - Gyula - Julius (Hungarian)

Or let's take the evolution of a famous person's name, artist Andy Warhol.  The surname is found in Ruthenian based records in Slovakia and Poland as Warchola.  Varchola.  Warchol.  Varchol. and, finally, his version, Warhol.

Likewise, you may see a name and then it says something that translates to alias, aka, or "from the house of."  What is going on here is that the family's surname has changed because:

1) They just felt like it.  Perhaps to honor a relative or to take on more luster than the earlier name. A person who moved a great distance to where no one knows him or her could do this easily.  (Many a French courtesan during the Paris Belle Epoch days changed her name to indicate a noble past she never had.)

2) The male line died out and to continue it some agreement was made that the female line would continue the name.  (Check out the ancestry of Prince Albert II of Monaco and the family's history of dealings to continue the Grimaldi name.)

3) The name was changed due to an elevation in status by a King or other prominent person, perhaps because of excellent military service.

4) A clan of people, perhaps founders of a nation or early incoming tribes, evolved a number of surnames that over time were used by those descending from the tribe. The name evolves over generations.

5) Someone who long ago had a distinguishing feature such as red hair, thus being called something like Johnny the Red, goes for the surname Carmine or Veres. 

6) An illegitimate child goes by the surname of its mother, until the genetic father or the man who later married that woman informally or formally adopts it.  (Sometimes because people remarried quickly, a woman pregnant by a husband who died remarried and the child carried the name of the father whose house he or she was birthed in.) Or the child remains illegitimate (a legal term - in 19th century it means the child does not have right to inheritance from the father) but is recognized by the birth father and assumes or is given the right to the name. Or the child remains illegitimate, but the mother uses the father's surname anyway.

Surnames are fascinating!

This post is one of a series on the subject.  Click on the tag Surname Help - AWG to get to the posts.

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I first read this blog several years ago...\
The author was a witness to 9/11.
She has blogged on several of her ethnic heritage lines including the line that comes from a Croatian village in Hungary.  She has published a Quick Guide to Hungarian Genealogy.

NO LINK BETWEEN VLAD TEPES AND ELIZABETH BATHORY - LET'S LOOK AT THIS FROM A GENEALOGICAL AND REINCARNATIONAL POV

A nice lady named Elizabeth contacted me a while back hoping that I could be quoted, if there was some link, through genealogy or reincarnation, between two notorious figures of Old Central Europe, Vlad Tepes (otherwise known as Vlad the Impaler) who lived in Transylvania and was Romanian and a Prince and military leader, and Elizabeth Bathory, a Hungarian countess who was probably mentally ill, and who may have murdered dozens of beautiful young girls, in order to preserve her own youth or beauty. 

It seems that the Hollywood horror flick mythologies of Hungarians and Romanians as creepy people is taken for history and with all the media fascination, films and television shows that are occult based, about witches and vampires in recent years, I suppose there are a lot of people who feel familiar with and enjoy "the dark side" and want to explore "power."

The story of Elizabeth Bathory is associated with evil, with vampirism, and of power over the powerless, like a huge number of Slovak servant girls gone missing.  Were they so desperate for work that when their friends disappeared but they still went on interviews to the manor house?

No one should be worried about Elizabeth and inheriting mental illness, which I believe to be schizophrenia,  unless they can trace their genealogy and DNA back to her through their MATERNAL LINE.  Science has now proven that while sons inherit the gene for this mental illness, they cannot pass it on through their children.  It is passed from a mother to her children, meaning only Elizabeth's two daughters could pass it on.  Even then there is evidence that a person can have the gene for it and not develop it and further that about 20% of schizophrenics are spontaneously healed of the mental illness as they age.

It seems unbelievable to me that the locals didn't know something was amiss and put a stop to it before so very many young women were disappeared. Remember that there were so fewer people alive on earth back in those days, fewer people per square mile, fewer people to keep track of, less anonymity.  People lived off the land, agriculturally, and even if there was a manor house or castle or estate with a town around it everyone knew everyone because the main business of the estate was agricultural so in the villages they were seeing people they knew frequently, working with them every day, and gossiping about each other, keeping track of who married, who had babies, and who died. 

What is implied is that because Elizabeth Bathory was noble and came from a powerful family she could get away with anything, that no one, not even her husband or family, would put a stop to her behavior, and that they were all sociopaths if they didn't try to stop her because all this was simply not right.

I found this site that is interesting http://bathory.org/shyla.html   Anyone wishing to quote the owner of that site would need to get in contact with them.  And you would want them to provide their documentation for each statement.

If we look at this story from a genealogical POV, trying to prove it, we would need documentation recorded in reliable old books and ledgers.  I've yet to find any documentation of any murders that Elizabeth might have committed through anything close to a public or civil record, but according to this site, she recorded 612 deaths in her diary.  So let's go back to the reality of living in those days, the smaller population, the way everyone knew everyone, and consider that 612 girls lured to torture and death, is greatly over and beyond the numbers that some of our most notorious mass murderers have been able to get away with today.  Think about 612 girls in a relatively short period of time and in one place.  What did she do with the bodies?  Maybe her diary is full of her hallucinations and ravings?

Since such subjects are of fascination, I've met people who say that they think Elizabeth, a powerful lady, was the subject of slanderous accusations.

So many things about Elizabeth Bathory's life were ordinary.  She was from nobility and she married a noble.  She married, she had children, she was supposedly able to compartmentalize so well that she was considered a loving mother.  Who hasn't heard another woman being called a bitch or witch today?  . 

Was she "a witch"?  As for "witches," people should know that during the times these people lived in, the accusation of witchcraft could be used on any woman who was not understood, or any woman who had not married or had children, or who was considered ugly or deformed, or who was different, or simply not liked.  People were born into their class, their roles in this life and there wasn't a lot of tolerance for people who were different.  It was an era of superstition, not science.  When people accused other people of being witches, they were not talking the present day organization called Wicca, or nature worship, or the paganism of say, Native Americans.  Talk of evil and witches (and Satan) was almost always that of people who were Christians and Bible based. 

As for reincarnation,  this is where I'm really thrown. Is there someone claiming to be a reincarnation of either or both Vlad and Elizabeth out there?  Certainly I've never met anyone claiming so or heard of anyone claiming so. 

And let's wrap our minds around this further, Vlad may have chopped off the heads of those he killed in battle and put them on spikes, but he wasn't the only one.  This tactic was used by the Turks.  It was used in South East Asia in the 1960's and 1970's.  The same tactic of exhibiting the heads of those killed is being used by ISIS.   Terrifying.

Reincarnation has been accepted as a spiritual reality by Hindus, Buddhists, and many other religions throughout the world for a long time.  It was a matter of belief.  A sensibility.  These days, through the use of hypnotic regression, and through the testimonials of children who recall past lives, there seems to be more evidence for it.  Having a past life or lives and recalling it through these means, dreams, deja vu, and so on, is not associated with "the dark side,"  or evil.

That's not to say that people never remember horrible things happening to them while regressed.

I was in a classroom in which everyone was regressed and there was a couple there who believed themselves to be soul mates who, in the past life they shared, were both victims of a concentration camp during the WWII Holocaust.