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Wow, that's interesting. I wonder if there was something similar going on prior to American independence? My ancestors immigrated to the US in the early 1700s.
by Amezarak 13y ago
Wow, that's interesting. I wonder if there was something similar going on prior to American independence? My ancestors immigrated to the US in the early 1700s. For some inexplicable reason that no one has been able to figure out, they changed their surname from a Germanic-sounding one to (apparently) totally unrelated nonsense (an unfortunate side effect is that every living family member can be uniquely identified in the world by first plus last name.) If it was some kind of passenger list screwup, that'd make some sense.
- waterlesscloud 13y agoAt least three branches of my family are pre-revolution immigrants. Two are scots-irish and just have the surnames that still exist in Scotland (though maybe anglicized over there way back, I don't actually know). One is French Huguenot, though,and it's not so much anglicized as just misspelled. It certainly would have marked them as French, but I wonder how much of it is just chalked up to poor literacy on all sides.
- derekp7 13y agoThat's interesting -- my family name is from the French Huguenot also. There are a few different spellings -- from what I was told, there was a family fight a many generations ago, and 3 brothers each changed to a different spelling. From what I understand, this was somewhat common at the time, to change the family name spelling in order to distance oneself from the family.