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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