Collins 140
Cook 135
Cooper 110
Cox 108
Crawford 74
Cunningham 71
Davis 472
Dixon 53
Duncan 51
Dunn 69
Edwards 127
Elliott 65
Ellis 84
Erickson 55
Evans 150
Ferguson 64
Fisher 94
Fitzgerald 51
Ford 81
Foster 103
Fox 70
Freeman 68
Fuller 51
Gardner 68
Gibson 70
Gilbert 49
Gordon 72
Graham 92
Grant 60
Gray 112
Green 200
Griffin 85
Hall 210
Hamilton 93
Hansen 90
Hanson 64
Harper 52
Harris 252
Harrison 77
Hart 72
Hawkins 58
Hayes 84
Henderson 90
Henry 67
Hicks 56
Hill 170
Hoffman 67
Holmes 72
Hopkins 53
Howard 112
Hudson 52
Hughes 116
Hunt 64
Jackson 270
James 88
Jenkins 86
Jensen 64
Johnson 873
Johnston 66
Jones 566
Jordan 70
Kelley 70
Kelly 164
Kennedy 94
King 196
Knight 51
Lane 53
Larson 76
Lee 156
Lewis 212
Long 102
Lynch 67
Marshall 73
Martin 276
Mason 64
McCarthy 56
McDonald 94
Meyer 64
Miller 526
Mills 56
Mitchell 154
Moore 302
Morgan 115
Morris 134
Morrison 53
Murphy 188
Murray 96
Myers 102
Nelson 230
Newman 80
O’Brien 100
O’Connor 52
Olson 104
Owens 65
Palmer 68
Parker 131
Patterson 89
Payne 57
Perkins 58
Perry 88
Peters 55
Peterson 172
Phillips 140
Porter 69
Powell 72
Price 96
Reed 122
Reynolds 92
Rice 74
Richards 57
Richardson 103
Riley 66
Roberts 158
Robertson 66
Robinson 204
Rogers 122
Rose 59
Ross 106
Russell 104
Ryan 104
Sanders 88
Schmidt 71
Schultz 61
Scott 180
Shaw 70
Simmons 77
Simpson 72
Smith 1132
Snyder 84
Spencer 55
Stephens 53
Stevens 76
Stewart 131
Stone 64
Sullivan 150
Taylor 310
Thomas 269
Thompson 293
Tucker 64
Turner 142
Wagner 76
Walker 216
Wallace 83
Walsh 74
Ward 122
Warren 58
Washington 61
Watkins 53
Watson 104
Weaver 58
Webb 67
Weber 52
Welch 55
Wells 77
West 78
Wheeler 52
White 292
Williams 600
Williamson 50
Willis 50
Wilson 371
Wood 132
Woods 66
Wright 188
Young 2101
It will be noted that this list shows a number of plainly non-British names, e.g., Meyer, Schultz, Cohen and some of the forms in -son and -sen. A great many German and Jewish Schmidts must be concealed among the Smiths, but there is still room for 71 Schmidts per 100,000, or more than the number of Armstrongs, Bradleys, Dixons, Elliotts or Fergusons. As for Cohen, it outranks Carpenter, Chapman, Dixon, Duncan, Fuller, Harper, Hopkins, Knight and Spencer, and crowds Grant, Hawkins, Perkins, Warren and Weaver. Smith, of course, is an occupational name, but in modern times the number of smiths in the population is certainly not enough to account for its dominance among surnames. The explanation lies in the fact that in the days when it was first used the term signified any craftsman employing a hammer, and hence included wood- and stone- as well as metal-workers.1 There is some reason for believing that Smith was once an even more common surname than it is today. In 1876, for example, a writer in the Galaxy2 said that one out of every 70 New Yorkers then bore it, and that the ratio had been one in 83 in 1825, but today the Manhattan telephone directory shows not much beyond one in 300. This decline, of course, is partly to be accounted for by the extraordinarily heavy non-British immigration into the New York area. The Army and Social Security figures and the telephone directories of other cities and towns show that elsewhere about one American in every hundred is still a Smith. Thus it remains the leading surname in the United States, as it is in England, Scotland and Wales.3 It is surpassed by Cohen in Manhattan4 and by Johnson in Chicago, but in both cases it is a close runner-up, and nearly everywhere else it is first.5
Among the names that follow it there are differing arrangements in different places. For the United States as a whole the order is Smithy, Johnson, Brown, Williams, Miller, Jones, Davis, Anderson, Wilson, Taylor, Thomas, Moore, White, Martin, Thompson, Jackson, Harris and Lewis, with Cohen in forty-first place and Burke in forty-fifth, but in New York City Cohen is in first place and Murphy, Kelly, Meyer and Schwartz are among the first ten.1 In Chicago, with Johnson in first place, those that follow in order are Smith, Anderson, Miller, Brown, Peterson, Jones, Williams, Wilson and Thompson. In Philadelphia the order is Smith, Miller, Brown, Jones, Johnson, Wilson, Kelly, Williams, Taylor and Davis. In Boston the first five are Smith, Sullivan, Brown, Johnson and Murphy, in New Orleans they are Smith, Levy, Miller, Williams and Brown, in San Francisco they are Smith, Johnson, Brown, Miller and Williams, and in northern New Jersey they are the same, but arranged Smith, Miller, Brown, Johnson and Williams.2 The Social Security returns show that other common surnames tend to clump in distinct regions. Thus Adams, Bailey, Jenkins and Nelson are most numerous in Ohio, Kentucky and Michigan, and Moore in Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey. In Grand Rapids, Mich., in a region of heavy Dutch settlement; the first five names are Smith, Johnson, Miller, Brown and Anderson, but the sixth is the Dutch DeVries, the ninth is DeYoung (DeJong) and the eleventh is Van Dyke.3 Throughout Minnesota Johnson is so widespread that bearing it is a political asset, and some years ago a member of the clan became a formidable candidate for office by simply announcing his name: though he offered no platform and made no campaign he polled 44,049 votes out of 151,686 cast.1
Howard F. Barker estimates that only about a third of present-day Americans have English surnames by virtue of English blood in the male line, but to them, of course, must be added the large numbers whose ancestors acquired such names in Scotland, Wales or Ireland, the perhaps even larger numbers who have adopted English surnames in place of non-British names, and the Negroes. Counting in variants, about 35,000 native surnames are in use in England, but the number is less in the United States, for there has been a tendency here since the e
arliest days, save only in New England, to abandon unusual forms and spellings for commoner and more familiar ones. Thus Leigh and Lea have been largely absorbed by Lee, Davies by Davis,2 Cowper by Cooper, Baillie by Bailey, Forster by Foster, Colquhoun by Calhoun, and Smyth and Smythe by Smith. Baker, Carter and Moore, no doubt because they are short and easy to remember, are relatively more frequent in this country than in England, and have probably engulfed various similar names, e.g., More, Mohr and Muir. Parker and Hall hold their own among us, maybe for much the same reasons.3 Barker notes several general tendencies that seem to be peculiar to the United States. One wars upon final e, so that Browne and Greene become Brown and Green. Another lops off the -son ending, so that Harris runs far ahead of Harrison. A third adds a final s to various short names, so that Hay becomes Hayes, Brook becomes Brooks and Stephen becomes Stevens.4 A fourth converts such difficult endings as -borough, -holme and -thwaite into simple forms, e.g., -bury, -om (as in Newsom from Newsholme) and -white. Many Americans of Scottish ancestry have dropped the Mac from their names, and many Irish families that came in as Mc’s or O’s have similarly abandoned the prefixes. Barker says that Mack and Gill, which are much more common in the United States than in Great Britain, “serve as substitutes or contractions for a host of ‘hard’ Irish names,” such as McGillicuddy, Mcllhatton, and McGeoghegan. The Welsh form seen in ap Lloyd, i.e., son of Lloyd, is almost unknown here, though it survives in Wales. But in such vestigial forms as Floyd, Bowen, Powell, Price, Pumphrey, Pugh, Prichard and Upjohn, from ap Lloyd, ap Owen, ap Howell, ap Rhys, ap Humphrey, ap Hugh, ap Richard and ap John, it flourishes.1
The earliest known list of English surnames comes from the Pipe Roll of 1159–60. Ewen says that no less than 94% of the persons listed had them in some form or other. Of these names, 5% indicated racial extraction, 35% were geographical, 19% were occupational, 21% showed descent, and 14% remained unidentifiable. The first Irish names are recorded in documents nearly three centuries older than the Pipe Rolls, and many of them are still common, e.g., O’Connor, O’Donnell, O’Neill, O’Loughlin, O’Donovan and O’Brien.2 Since the setting up of the Irish Free State (Saorstat Eireann) on January 15, 1922,3 and indeed since the dawn of the Irish Literary Renaissance, c. 1890, there has been a fashion among Irish politicians and literati for reviving the ancient Gaelic forms of both surnames and given-names, and as a result such forbidding examples as MacEochain (Geoghegan), O Tuathail (O’Toole), MacSuibhne (McSweeney), OSuileabhain (O’Sullivan), Omarchadha (Murphy) and O Muircheartaigh (Moriarty) now spot the Irish newspapers, but in America this romantic but somewhat absurd affectation has found very few imitators.1 The public records of Scotland, with few exceptions, do not go back in time beyond the beginning of the Fourteenth Century, and as a result the study of Scottish surnames, many of them common in America, is full of difficulties. But George F. Black, a Scottish-American scholar, has tackled those difficulties ingeniously and pertinaciously in a book that is one of the best works on surnames ever published.2
It shows that many familiar Scottish names are not Gaelic in origin, but Norman, English, Flemish, Danish or Irish. Carlisle, for example, comes from the name of the town in England, Bruce is a French territorial name, and Macaulay is from the Norse. There is little assurance, when an indubitable Scot sports an ancient and famous surname, that his arteries run blood of the clan to which he apparently belongs. The plain people of the early days simply took the names of the bloodletters whose banners they followed, and not infrequently they changed their names as they switched clans. During the early Seventeenth Century, a time of great turmoil in Scotland, so many ruffians thus enrolled themselves as MacGregors that an act was passed on April 3, 1603, abolishing that surname altogether, and making its use a capital offense. Many of the bogus MacGregors thereupon took other names – those of Perth, for example, announced that “in all tyme heirefter” they would “tak to thame and call thameselffis the name of Johnnestoun” —,8 but the overwhelming majority resisted the law, and in 1661 it was suspended by King Charles II. A generation later the MacGregors took to the bush again, and in 1693 the law was reënacted, but the bearers of the name continued to cling to it and during the Eighteenth Century not a few of them came to America, bringing it along.4 But most of their descendants are probably no more related to the King Giric who is said to have founded the clan, c. 900, nor even to that later chief who boasted that wherever he sat was the head of the table, than Booker T. Washington was related to George. Other famous Scottish names attracted recruits in the same wholesale manner, notably Stewart, Campbell and MacDonald. Thousands of the proscribed MacGregors became MacDonalds, and to this day MacDonald is the most common of all surnames in Scotland, next to Smith. Even in the United States it ranks above such familiar English names as Barnes, Ellis, Ford, Graham and James. As for Campbell, it outranks Mitchell, Turner, Cook and Lee. As for Stewart in its various forms, it is ahead of Ward, Rogers and Edwards and on a par with Parker and Morris.
The first non-British immigrants to appear along the Atlantic seaboard in considerable numbers were the Dutch, who settled on Manhattan island in 1613 and held most of what is now New York until 1664. They occupied a large part of Long Island and nearly the whole valley of the Hudson, and also spilled into New Jersey, but even in the earliest days their hegemony was challenged by Frenchmen and Englishmen, to say nothing of Swedes and Germans. Marcus L. Hansen estimates1 that by 1790 there were but 55,000 persons of Dutch descent in New York in a total population of 314,366. Many of these Dutch had retained their native names, e.g., Schuyler, Schermerhorn, Stuyvesant and Ten Eyck, and some had even enforced the true Dutch pronunciation thereof, but many others had been compelled to yield to the pressure of English speechways. An example is offered by the Van Kouwenhoven family, whose progenitor, Wolphert Gerretse of that ilk, arrived in America in 1625. Some of his descendants retain the family name to this day, but others first changed Kouwenhoven to Couwenhoven, and then proceeded from Couwenhoven to Cowenhoven, Cowan, Konover and Conover.2 In the same way, no doubt, many a Gerretse became a Garrett, many a Vosmaer became a Foster and perhaps even some of the Stuyvesants became Stevensons. The carnage of names closely resembling English forms, e.g., Smid, Visscher, Jong, Prins and Kuiper, must have been great indeed: it is still great among the later Dutch of Michigan.1 Says a correspondent who is a descendant of Hudson Valley pioneers:
In 1680 the present name of Blauvelt2 was Blaewwveldt; it became Blawveldt, Blawfelt and Blawvelt before, a century later, it settled down to its surviving form. Many Coopers are descended from Klass Van Purvaments. His son, a cooper, subscribed himself Cornelius Klassen Cuyper, and Cuyper finally became Cooper. Harmanus Dauws(e), an interpreter, took the occupational surname of Taelman (in present-day Dutch, taalsman), and his descendants are now Tallmans. Bomgaert became Boogaert, Bogardus, Bogert and Bogart. Boetcher became Butcher; Haringh, Haring or Herring; Ten Eyre and Tenure, Turner; Lammaerts, Lambert; DeKlerke, Clark; Concklijn, Conkling; DeKype, Kipp or Kip; DeHarte, Hart. Surnames, in the early days, were often patronymics fashioned from the given-names of fathers. Thus came Gerrittsen, which is now Garrison; Theunissen, which is Tennyson; Dirckssen and Derricksen, which are Dickson, Dickinson and Dickens; Harmansen, which is Harrison, and Karlsen, which is Carlson.3
Sometimes, of course, the thing ran the other way, and it is highly probable that some of the early English settlers assumed Dutch names. Indeed, there is record of one named Marston, whose descendants became distinguished under the Dutch-sounding name of Masten.4 I have also heard of an O’Dell family descended from a Hollander named Odle or something of the sort. French names were not uncommon among the early Dutch, and they were reinforced by the names of settlers who were really Frenchmen, e.g., Demarest (Des Marest), Deronde (DuRonde) and Harcourt. Despite the grandiose social pretensions of some of their descendants, not many of the Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam were of gentle blood: the great majority of them, like the great majority of all other groups of immig
rants, were farmers, traders and mechanics. The Van in the names of so many of them is not to be confused with the German von, which connotes the Adelstand.1 Readers of Alexander W. Thayer’s monumental life of Beethoven will recall that poor Ludwig, during one of his litigations in Vienna, had to confess on the stand that the Van before his name did not indicate noble blood, and that he was thus not entitled to trial in the courts reserved for the nobility. In the United States some of the persons of Dutch descent have sought to enhance their status by writing the Van of their names as van, but the rest take it lightly, and many of them amalgamate it with other particles or with the stem or with both, e.g., Vanderbilt, Vandenberg, Vander Veer or Vanderveer (sometimes reduced to Vandeveer or Vandiver), Vandergrift and Vandervelde. Van de Venter also appears as Van Deventer and Vandeventer and Van Nuys as Vannuys or Vannice. Many other families have dropped the Van altogether, notably the Roosevelts, who were originally Van Roosevelts.2 The sonorous names borne by latter-day Hollanders of aristocratic pretensions, e.g., A. F. H. Troostenburg de Bruyn, George van Tets van Goudriaan and A. W. L. Tjarda van Starenburgh Stockouwer,3 are quite unknown among Dutch-Americans. Jansen, a common Dutch surname, probably made heavy contributions to the multitude of American Johnsons.4
The Germans were the first immigrants to undergo this name-changing process on a really large scale. They were represented in the colonies of John Smith in Virginia, of the Dutch in New York and of the Swedes on the Delaware, but the first whole shipload of them to arrive landed in 1683. After that they came in increasing numbers, chiefly to Pennsylvania, and by the middle of the Eighteenth Century they or their children made up a third of the population of the province. But the Quakers and so-called Scotch Irish had been ahead of them, and when their names were enrolled as the laws of the time required the enrolling officials made a dreadful mess of the business. Nearly all the newcomers spoke rustic dialects of German and many of them were illiterate, so the difficulty of recording their true surnames, in numerous cases, amounted to impossibility. There were, for example, the frequent names in bach, including Bach alone. The German ch-sound did not daunt the Celtic jobholders, for, as Barker has suggested, it existed in their own speech, but in that speech it was often spelled gh, as in MacLaughlin, Dougherty and McCullough, so it was turned into gh on the records, and there thus arose the innumerable Baughs, Baughmans, Harbaughs, Ebaughs (Ebach or Ibach) and the like.
American Language Supplement 2 Page 58