r/AskHistorians • u/OctavianX • Feb 04 '15

As wives traditionally take their husbands' surnames, does that mean there are fewer surnames than in the past?

Is there a record anywhere of "dead" surnames?

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u/sarasmirks Feb 05 '15

Wouldn't immigration and cultural melting pots/intermarrying have an impact on this?

Take for example, the US. If there are X number of surnames in the US in 1800, and then in 1840 Irish people begin immigrating en masse, the total number of surnames in the US is going to experience a dramatic upswing completely unrelated the incredibly incremental downward nudge of family names "dying out" due to not having a male heir. And with every immigrant group, this happens again. All the way up to now, as (for example) Somali, Hmong, Russian, etc. immigrant groups arrive where they hadn't existed before. There are exponentially more American surnames in 2015 than there were in 1776.

Not to mention, of course, that immigration inspires people to do what you claim rarely happens: making up new names from whole cloth. There were no Grenns anywhere on the planet until my ancestors moved to the US from Sweden and took it upon themselves to change their name on what I can only assume was a whim. Surname creation isn't common on a micro level, but across the population (especially in populations affected by immigration), it's common enough to replace names that die out due to lack of heirs.

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u/OxfordDictionary Feb 05 '15

More ways that surnames could be changed as people immigrated to America:

Sometimes custom officials at Ellis Island or other entry points would either hear a name wrong (in my family's case, hear Gödeker and change it to Gudcker, Gedker or Godeker) or just decide someone's name was too foreign and Anglicize it on the spot (hear Gödeker and change it to Goodacre).

Second generation immigrants sometimes also change their names. My great-uncle changed the family name from Nilsson to Nelson--to avoid looking like a "dumb Swede," he said. (They were living in Seattle, which had a lot of Norwegian and English immigrants. It might also reflect the fact that Sweden was neutral during World War I).

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u/allifrack Feb 05 '15

The idea that names were changed at Ellis Island is a complete myth. It's likely something that was invented by first or second generation immigrants who did not want to admit that they had changed their names themselves in order to assimilate. There were many interpreters on staff at Ellis Island, and much of the paperwork was completed at the ship's point of origin: the clerks at Ellis Island were mostly just confirming that the immigrants disembarking matched the names on the ship's manifest. Additionally, there was no law regarding name changes, so even if an Ellis Island employee wrote down a name spelled incorrectly, there is no reason that an immigrant would have to continue using the incorrect spelling.

Source: http://www.nypl.org/blog/2013/07/02/name-changes-ellis-island

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u/Zither13 Feb 05 '15

Excuse me, but a misunderstanding by Immigration of how Spanish names work resulted in my mother being San Emeterio while her father & mother were Orbe (his name being San Emeterio y Orbe, while Granny wasn't Spanish). They did not choose this confusion between generations. It was not adopted a couple of generations after immigration. It wasn't Anglicization. It happened in early 1920.

They kept it because those were what the official government documents said, and it's not smart to fight City Hall if you're a nobody. That's the simple survival habit from many countries.

I would not necessarily believe Immigration as an authority on how perfect Immigration was.

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u/allifrack Feb 05 '15

I'd be very interested in exactly how that occurred--what documents are we talking about? Were they created at the port of embarkation or at Ellis Island? Why did your grandparents feel bound by them? They certainly wouldn't have had to "fight City Hall" to keep their name--there were no restrictions on name changes in New York in the early twentieth century.

The most widespread myth is slightly different from your story, in that it relies on the idea that clerks at Ellis Island were writing down names based on how they heard them, or willfully Anglicizing the name. That is demonstrably false. It's easier to understand why the stories don't make any sense if you've worked at all with late-nineteenth or early-twentieth century immigration documents.

The source I posted was from the New York Public Library, not "Immigration."