In my class there are two children with the same last name but they don’t know each other. How is that possible? And if I search for my name on Facebook or the internet, for example, there are thousands with my first and last name, but I don’t know those people. Is it just a coincidence that those people come up with a fake name or is it still far in history?
Answer
Hi Hakan,
Surnames as we know them today, have been established by the creation of an administration, with us since at least the 16th century (parish registers). From then on, as a resident of an area, or member of a parish, or owner of land, you must be traceable, and you are that by your name and surname.
Before that, family names already existed, but those names were mainly used to show the kinship of people. In general, surnames referred to the father: you were the son of. If we limit ourselves to Dutch for a moment, we see a lot of Petersen, Willemsen, Michielsen, Jacobsen and so on! That means no more than that at a certain moment Jan was called son of Willem Jan Willemsen and that it was fixed in this way, it was recorded.
Sometimes you could also refer to people by giving them a nickname: De Vos was a smart, handy person, De Wolf perhaps more of a dangerously aggressive person. Or you could refer to the origin of people. Van Paris, or Van Aalst. Now: at a certain moment that reference, son of, nickname or origin, becomes something fixed and irreversible, something that is recorded and from then on it is a family name.
In the Netherlands, surnames were collected and written down nationally under French rule in the early 19th century. Out of resistance, many people started to give invented surnames, such as Citroen, Kwakkel, Kloote, etc. But the French, they just wrote it down, and then nothing could be done about it: whatever those names had really been, from then on Citroen was the name of the family. (Cf. the Citroën car brand).
Now: conversely, some names do indeed refer to a common origin. But it can go so far back in time that you of course don’t remember that you were ever related. Via Familienaam.be you can see surnames on a map, and you can see that there are very clear concentration areas of certain names, where a tribal clan of that family was once present.
Family names are therefore rarely unique, unless it concerned those typical Dutch mock names from the time of Napoleon 😉
http://www.familyname.be/
http://www.ernieramaker.nl/raar.php?t=surnames
Answered by
prof. Dr. Dries Tys
Archaeology, History
Pleinlaan 2 1050 Ixelles
http://www.vub.ac.be/
.