1 I am indebted here to Mr. Max Stern, director of the Informational Service of the Social Security Board.
2 AL4, p. 477.
3 Johnston was originally territorial – John’s ton. Ton, tun, toun, toune and tone meant a farm, manor, parish or other well-defined piece of land. The founder of the Johnston(e) clan gave his name to lands in Annandale, Dumfriesshire, c. 1174. In the early days the name was frequently confused with Jonson or Johnson. Black gives a list of 16 variant spellings, including Jhonestowne, Johanstoun, Johngston, Johnnesone, Joneston, Johnstoun and Joniston.
1 Washington dispatch in the Baltimore Evening Sun, March 8, 1944.
2 The Linguist Anthology; New York, 1945, p. 51.
3 Associated Press dispatch from Washington, Feb. 23, 1946. The resultant confusion gave a headache of high amperage to General Omar N. Bradley, the administrator, and he smote his bloomin’ lyre on the subject in a speech to the American Veterans of World War II, meeting in Washington.
1 I am indebted for this table and for much else to Mr. Howard F. Barker, one of the committee’s research associates and the foremost authority on American surnames.
1 This is on the authority of the NED, Vol. X, Part I, p. 278. In Icelandic smithur is still used in the sense of “blacksmith, carpenter, builder.” See Icelandic: Grammar, Texts, Glossary, by Stefan Einarsson; Baltimore, 1945, p. 450. Samuel Grant Oliphant, in his otherwise instructive The Clan of Fire and Forge, or, The Ancient and Honorable Smiths; Olivet, Mich., 1910, p. 6, falls into the error of restricting the original meaning of smith to “the worker in metals.”
2 The Inconvenience of Being Named Smith, April, pp. 498–504. This article was signed John Smith, but the Galaxy’s index credited it to Col. Nicholas Smith.
3 For the British ranking of names see the World Almanac for 1914, p. 668. The report of the Registrar-General for Scotland for 1937; Edinburgh, 1938, pp. lvi and lvii, shows that the ten leading names in Scotland in 1860 were Smith, MacDonald, Brown, Wilson, Thomson, Robertson, Campbell, Stewart, Anderson and Johnston, and that in 1935 Smith, MacDonald and Brown still held the first three places.
4 Six More Listed Surnames, New York Sun, Oct. 6, 1943.
5 Said Leigh Hunt in The Seer, XXXVII, 1840: “An Italian poet says he hates his name of John (Giovanni) because if anybody calls him by it in the street twenty people loot out of the window. Now let anybody call ‘John Smith’ and half Holborn will cry out ‘Well?’ ” Said the once famous Fanny Fern (Sara Payson Willis Parton): “When Adam got tired of naming his numerous descendants he said, ‘Let all the rest be called Smith.’ ” (Fanny Fern: a Memorial Volume, edited by James Parton; New York, 1873, p. 208.) Said the New Yorker, March 2, 1940: “Moving into one of those apartment buildings that are supplied with electricity by a contracting company which buys juice from Edison and meters it out to individuals, a Mr. Levy was surprised and hurt, since he always pays his bills before the tenth of the month, to get a request for a ten-dollar deposit. He made a fuss about it, and finally a representative of the company called upon him to explain. ‘Whenever we get a new customer named Smith, Brown, Cohen, Jones, Levy, or Johnson, we always ask for a deposit,’ he said. ‘It’s too much bother to look up their credit ratings.’ ” Said Anthony L. Ellis in Prisoner at the Bar; London, 1934, p. 25: “In all the wide vocabulary of the English language are there two words which, conjointly, suggest a finer guarantee of simple faith than the name John Smith? The words are the embodiment of honesty, of purpose, the epitome of rugged sincerity and truth.” But enough of this Smithiana.
1 An investigation undertaken in 1933 by clients of the Emergency Unemployment Relief Committee showed that the lead of Cohen in Brooklyn, at least among telephone subscribers, was then tremendous. There were 11,314 Cohens listed, to 6,817 Smiths, 5,614 Millers, 4,384 Browns and 2,005 Joneses. See 11,314 Brooklyn Cohens, New York Sun, Feb. 28, 1933.
2 Our Leading Surnames, by Howard F. Barker, American Speech June, 1926, pp. 470–77.
3 I am indebted here to Mr. Daniel Litscher of Grand Rapids.
1 Believe It or Not, by R. L. Ripley, Buffalo Evening News, Aug. 25, 1936.
2 In the English Who’s Who, in 1937, there were 98 Davieses and but 31 Davises; in the American Who’s Who there were 163 Davises and but 14 Davieses. I am indebted here to Mr. Roger Howson, of New York.
3 Hall, Parker, and Company, Surnames, by Howard F. Barker. American Speech, Aug., 1926, pp. 596–607.
4 “Surnames [in -son]” says Louise Pound, American Speech, April, 1936, p. 187, “occur often with a simple s and those who come to know such forms first remain eternally oblivious of divergences. The added s need not be thought of as a plural sign. Usually it is an old possessive patronymic ending.”
1 It is dealt with in A History of Surnames of the British Isles, by C. L’Estrange Ewen; New York, 1931, pp. 206–08 and 255. “In Wales,” adds Ewen, “there is little variety among native surnames, since they are nearly all of the genealogical class, and in order to add distinction a custom has grown of bestowing the mother’s maiden name as a Christian name, and for the subsequent generation to couple the two by hyphen.” David Lloyd George, the politician, got his surname by this route. His father was a George and his mother a Lloyd. He never used a hyphen, but always insisted that his surname was Lloyd George, not simply George.
2 Irish Names and Surnames, by Patrick Woulfe; Dublin, 1923, pp. xvi-xx. Ireland, says Woulfe, “was the first country after the fall of the Western Empire to adopt hereditary surnames.”
3 The name was changed to Eire on Dec. 29, 1937.
1 Many examples are in Woulfe’s Irish Names and Surnames, lately cited, pp. 55–161. The O is never separated from the name by an apostrophe. Either it stands alone or it joins the next capital without a space. The Mac is always separated. The feminine form is Ni.
2 The Surnames of Scotland; Their Origin, Meaning, and History; New York, 1946. Black was born at Stirling, Scotland, in 1865, and after taking his degree at Edinburgh entered the service of the Scottish National Museum of Antiquities. In 1896 he joined the staff of the New York Public Library, where he remained for thirty-five years.
3 Others joined the clans of Stewart, Grant, Dougall, Ramsay and Cunninghame.
4 The act was finally repealed in 1784. By 1863, according to the Annual Report of the Registrar-General of Scotland, by James Stark, quoted in the Report of the Committee on Linguistic and National Stocks of the American Council of Learned Societies, before cited, p. 211, there were 10,000 of them again at large on the old soil.
1 The Minor Stocks in the American Population, in the Report of the Committee on Linguistic and National Stocks in the Population of the United States, before cited, p. 370.
2 300 Van Kouwenhoven Descendants Visit Fair, New York Herald Tribune, Sept. 2, 1939. See also The Descendants of Wolphert Gerretse van Kouwenhoven Through His Son, Jacob Wolfertsen van Couwenhoven, by Lincoln C. Cocheu; New York, 1943.
1 AL4, p. 485.
2 Represented by twelve entries in the Manhattan telephone directory, Summer-Fall, 1946.
3 Mr. Everett DeBaun, private communication, Jan. 23, 1945. For Long-street and Pennypacker see AL4, p. 480. For other Dutch names see The Origin and Meaning of English and Dutch Surnames of New York State Families, by George Rogers Howell, a paper read before the Albany Institute, May 15, 1894, and later printed as a pamphlet. This pamphlet is in the New York Public Library.
4 Marston is an English territorial name, meaning the town on the marsh, and is traced to 1273 by Charles Wareing Bardsley in A Dictionary of English and Welsh Surnames; London, 1901, p. 517.
1 This is true, of course, only when it is written with a small v. The capitalized Von is no more significant than the Dutch Van.
2 AL4, p. 480, n. 2.
3 The first was once secretary of the Netherlands legation at Washington, the second was private secretary to Queen Wilhelmina, and the third was governor-general of the Netherlands East Indies.
4 AL4,
p. 477. See also pp. 479, 481 and 485.
1 Before cited, p. 288.
2 Saint Paul’s Lutheran Church of Arcadia, Baltimore County, in the report of the Society for the History of Germans in Maryland; Baltimore, 1929, p. 27.
3 Anglicized and Corrupted German Names in Virginia, by Herman Schuricht, Pennsylvania-German, Vol. XII, 1911, pp. 305 and 306.
4 Orthographic and Phonological Changes in the German Surnames of Potosi, Wisconsin, by Elda O. Baumann. This paper, which was read before the Modern Language Association, is unpublished, but I have had access to it by the courtesy of the author.
5 pp. 482–85.
6 AL4, p. 480.
7 The cases of the composers Glück and Händel are familiar. For Händel see Handel, by Herbert Weinstock; New York, 1946, p. xiii.
1 In 1914 Snyder was forty-sixth in frequency among Philadelphia names, outranking Wood, Hall and Burns, and standing close to Jackson, Harris and Collins.
2 I take most of these from Pennsylvania German Family Names, by L. Oscar Kuhns; New York, 1902. The original form of a name often survives alongside a translation, transliteration or respelling. In 1947 General Dwight D. Eisenhower, G. C. B., flourished in Washington and Miss Thelma von Eisenhauer, a talented soprano, in Detroit, and there were Isenhours in Minnesota.
3 Orthographical and Phonological Changes in the German Surnames of Potosi, Wisconsin, lately cited.
1 Dutchified Surnames, Allentown (Pa.) Morning Call, Sept. 21, 1946.
2 Mr. Clyde V. Moyers, of Birmingham, Ala. (private communication, Aug. 16, 1946), tells me that his surname is pronounced Meyers.
1 Yoder notes that “later Amish immigrants in Ohio and elsewhere spell this name Noffsker.”
2 Recorded by Heintze as a variant of Georg.
3 Hanover (Pa.) Sun, Aug. 16, 1942: “One hundred and four were present … when the annual Swartz-Black reunion was held.”
4 Death notice in the Baltimore Sun, Oct. 23, 1942.
5 History and Genealogy of the Leibensperger Family, by Elmer I. Leibensperger; Reading (Pa.), 1943.
6 Milledulcia: A Thousand Pleasant Things From Notes & Queries; New York, 1857, p. 34. I am indebted here to Mr, Huntington Cairns.
1 I take these Maryland examples from Saint Paul’s Lutheran Church, before cited.
2 George Westinghouse, by Albert B. Faust, American-German Review, Aug., 1945, p. 6.
3 Bricker of Ohio, by Karl B. Pauly; New York, 1944, p. 15.
4 Billy Sunday: His Tabernacles and Sawdust Trails, by Theodore Thomas Frankenberg; Columbus (O.), 1917. p. 27.
5 Cousin of Buffalo Bill Dies Here at Age of 94, Baltimore Sun, March 23, 1936.
6 Public Men In and Out of Office, by J. L. Salter; Chapel Hill (N.C.), 1946, p. 54.
7 Deutsche Namen in Amerika, by Stephan Kekule von Stradonitz, B.Z. am Mittag, Sept. 22, 1927.
8 His mother’s surname was Bowermaster, possibly from Bauermeister.
1 Dr. T. G. Pullen, Jr., State Superintendent of Education of Maryland, tells me that he has been so informed by a member of the Boone family.
2 The First 100 Years, published by the Perkins-Goodwin Company, New York, 1946, p. 11.
3 Pal Moore, Ex-Boxer, Dies at Age of 52, Baltimore Sun, Dec. 23, 1943. For many others see The German Element in the United States, by A. B. Faust; New York, 1909.
4 The Settlement of the German Coast of Louisiana and the Creoles of German Descent, by J. Hanno Deiler, German American Annals, July and August, 1909, pp. 194–97.
5 Deutsche Familiennamen unter fremden Völkern, by Stephen Kekule von Stradonitz, Mitteilungen der Akademie zur Wissenschaftlichen Erforshung, April-May, 1928, pp. 901–15.
6 Deiler, lately cited, p. 195.
7 Pennsylvania English, by George W. Hibbitt, American Speech, Feb., 1939, p. 43.
8 Ladies’ Repository (Cincinnati), Nov., 1861, p. 691. The story is there credited to “Mr. Livingston in his admirable answer to Mr. Jefferson concerning the batture case at New Orleans.” Another version, recorded by Olaf Sölmund in Namen Wandern, New York Staats-Zeiting, in 1940, makes the original name of the Scotsman Freyerstone.
1 William Wordsworth: His Life, Works and Influence, by G. McL. Harper; New York, 1916; Vol. I, p. 366.
2 There was a wholesale change of German names in England during World War I. King George V led by changing his surname from Wettin to Windsor by proclamation on July 17, 1917. At the same time the Tecks, Queen Mary’s family, changed their name to Cambridge, and the Battenbergs became Mountbattens. Simultaneously the head of the former family, Adolphus Charles Alexander Albert Edward George Philip Louis Ladislaus, Duke of Teck, became Marquess of Cambridge, Earl of Eltham and Viscount Northallerton, and his brother Alexander Augustus Frederick William Alfred George became Earl of Athlone and Viscount Trematon. The Battenbergs, whose German titles went back only to 1858, simply translated their surname. The head of the clan became Marquess of Milford Haven, Earl of Medina and Viscount Alderney, and his brother became Marquess of Carisbrooke, Earl of Berkhampsted and Viscount Launceton. Many well-known English families have surnames originally German, e.g., the Barings (Earl of Cromer, Earl of Northbrook, Lord Revelstoke). Goschens (Viscount Goschen), von Donops, and Gleichens.
3 Private communication, Nov. 20, 1941.
1 Private communication, Jan. 1, 1940.
2 But Abraham Lincoln knew how to pronounce Schurz, and liked to show off the fact. See Sumner’s “Right Grand Division,” by Darius N. Couch, Century Magazine, Aug., 1888, p. 636. The Baltimore Evening Sun once observed (Jan. 1, 1941) that while most American music-lovers manage to pronounce Richard Wagner’s surname with some approximation to the German fashion, few of them so pronounce his given-name.
3 I am indebted here to Mr. David Otis, of Brooklyn.
4 The World of Sholom Aleichem, by Maurice Samuel; New York, 1943, pp. 275 ff.
5 This name-changing among the comrades was not due wholly, of course, to a desire to get rid of Jewish names; another, and stronger, purpose was to confuse and throw off the police. Jews and non-Jews alike adopted aliases. Nikolai Lenin, for example, was that of a man originally Vladimir llyitch Ulianov, and Joseph Vissarionavitch Stalin is that of Iosiph Djagashvilli, Djugashvilli or Dzhugashville. When Earl Browder, then the putative head of the American Communists, was charged with getting a passport under a false name, part of his defense was that “party” names were commonly assumed by members of the party. Many of the Jews among them use English-sounding names.
1 Howard F. Barker notes in Surnames in -is, American Speech, April, 1927, p. 317, that Davis, Harris, Lewis and Morris are also very popular among American Jews, and that the fact may help to account for the high place held by these surnames on American name-lists. The English Jews, on being made peers, always take names that offer no suggestion of their origin, e.g., Beaconsfield, Burnham, Melchett and Reading.
2 July 29.
3 See AL4, p. 501. The authority quoted here in Dr. H. Flesch: Place-Names and First Names as Jewish Family Names, Jewish Forum, April, 1925. He adds that certain Jews took surnames as early as the Sixteenth Century, but that they tended to be variable. “The son,” he says, “did not always retain the father’s surname; with the change of market place or place of residence the surname changed. Thus Akiba Nausch from Neuzze near Frankfort, had a grandson called Akiba Lehrer, from Lehrensteinfeld; Tebi Aschkenasi had a son called Jacob Emden, and Samuel Kelin (from Kolin) had a son, Wolf Boskowitz.”
1 I take these examples from Die deutschen Familiennamen, by Albert Heintze; second edition; Halle a. S., 1903, pp. 66–68. For more see AL4, p. 501.
2 An example is given in AL4, p. 501, n. 2.
1 Reflex, Nov., 1928, pp. 27–31.
2 United Press dispatch from Boston, Aug. 16, 1923.
3 Cabot itself does not appear to be a British name, and Ewen does not list it in his History of Surnames of the British Isles. The first American Cabot to make a mark on history was George (1751–1823), a politician wh
ose life was written by Henry Cabot Lodge the elder; Boston, 1877. The mariner, John Cabot, was an Italian whose real name was Giovanni Caboto.
4 In England the law is substantially the same as in the United States, but it is customary for a man seeking to change his name to do so by applying for a royal license, which may be obtained as a matter of course by paying a large fee, or by advertising his intention in the newspapers and filing a deed-poll with the clerk of the Supreme Court. The aim in each case is to make it possible for him to continue under his new name whatever property or other rights he had under his old one. It is also possible to have a name changed by act of Parliament, but this is seldom resorted to. A. C. Fox-Davies and P. W. P. Carlton-Britton argued in A Treatise on the Law Concerning Names and Changes of Name; London, 1907, that “from the earliest times the Crown has made the assertion that change of name and the sanction thereof are within its prerogative,” but this was disputed, and indeed disproved, by a writer in the London Academy, May 4, 1907. This writer was probably C. L’Estrange Ewen, for the same arguments appear in his History of Surnames of the British Isles, pp. 408–13. Since 1919 the Aliens’ Restriction Act has forbidden any alien to assume a name by which he was not known before Aug. 4, 1914. But exemptions may be granted by royal license or by any Secretary of State. A British subject is still free to change his name as he pleases. For the law in New York see The How and Why of Name-Changing, by Helen P. Wulbern, American Mercury, June, 1947, p. 719.
1 The issue of this case inspired a Boston wit to the following parody of a well-known quatrain:
1 The case is reported in Variety, Oct. 25, 1923, p. 19.
2 Death notice, New York Times, April 12, 1946.
3 Announcement of engagement, New York Herald Tribune, Feb. 27, 1946.
4 Wedding notice, New York Times, March 3, 1946.
5 Death notice, the same, Feb. 24, 1946.
6 Same, same, Feb. 26, 1946.
7 Same, same, Sept. 7, 1946.
8 Joey Adams, author of From Gags to Riches; New York, 1946, says in his book that Abrams is his family name.
American Language Supplement 2 Page 64