My daughter asked me a few weeks ago why a last name is called a surname. I had no idea…but of course declared, “Word of the week!” and promptly looked it up. 😉
And it’s both straightforward and not. Sur is Latin for “above,” so the original meaning of surname was “an epithet, name, or title”–as in, something tacked on to one’s name. Think Catherine the Great or Sir William, Esquire. It began being used in that sense in the 1300s. But it only took about a hundred years for surname to be applied to family names instead of just titles or epithets.
I found it quite interesting to learn that family names came to the English world first among the Norman nobility in the 12th century. Commoners had begun to adopt the tradition a century later, but it began in the south of England and was slower to catch on in the north.
Do you know what your surname means or where it came from?
Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.
I should also mention that “dit” names were not only used by the French, especially in French Canada, but also by those of Scotland, and Italy. In my case, having had ancestry from France & later, French Canada, not knowing their dit name in addition to a change of spelling of the surname here in the states, made it impossible to locate ancestry on my father’s side. On my grandmother’s side tho’, it made it much easier to locate the correct family lineage as we knew their dit name & they had no spelling change. Yes, there’s a lot of interest to surnames & the addition of dit names. Just as the name White is a very common name, had your children’s ancestry lived in one of the countries which used dit names, you might find a very interesting story in their ancestry. If you so choose, I hope this information helps to make a nice study for your daughter.
If interested, here’s another lesson for your daughter…. Ask her if she knows what a “dit” name is amongst the French and why a “dit” name was tacked onto their “sur”name. She might find that interesting. For those of us who are descendants of those using “dit” names, it makes it very difficult, or in some cases easier to find their families in researching genealogy. See if she can tell you why after looking up the information.