Thursday, February 17, 2011
Changed names
Do you ever wonder where your last name comes from? Apparently when immigrants started to America from Europe back in the 1800s, many changed their last names. These reasons ranged from the desire to sound less Irish, to mere convenience purposes, although moving from place to place as populations grew made adapting second names necessary. In history class, Mrs. Norton said that someone in her family had a really long name, and they owned a pickle factory. Since he owned a pickle factory, he shortened the name and eventually it got to be just "Blaze." Doesn't that make you wonder about your name? When I look up my name, it's a variation of "Biagi." I looked that up, and there's many variations of that name. I wonder if there's all these distant relatives I don't know of with changed names...that'd be cool. I think it's all pretty interesting.
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I've actually wondered about the same thing before a couple years ago, and decided to look into some of my family's names. My mom's family came from Syria and means "miller." My Dad's last name is a Muslim name, which doesn't make sense since he's not Muslim at all, and means father of all Muslims. My great grandparents from my grandma's side of the family are Irish. Matthews was my great grandpa's name, and the Matthews came from Wales, went to England, Ireland, then to America. My great grandma's maiden name was Coffey. There are different variations of this name, but it all is the same family. Obviously this all interested me at some point. Why? Because it IS interesting ;)
ReplyDeleteLast names are pretty interesting. People think my last name has to do with the actual animal Seals. But as far as I know, my last name comes from a relative who made wax seals for letters :)
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