In rural Tyrol some people have so called House names. Often these are carried by people whose family has lived in a place for hundreds of years. E.g. my Grandfather Johann’s family owned a house that was known as Gug so he was known as Gughansi.
Some people are more well known by their house names than by their actual last names. We even call official last names Schriebnamen or written names because people back in the day usually wouldn’t be called their official names.
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In the town where I grew up definitely. Often those names were also passed on onto the next generation. It can be houses, but also appearances, hobbies or jobs.
I’ve been living in a city the last two decades and haven’t seen or heard it there.
Yes, here in the village I live in, people are often called after the house/family where they live, which often is not the actual last name of them or their family.
For example you have an Anton Novak, but he lives in the house of the “Mlinar” family, which means “Müller” in german, so the house is called “pr’ Mlinar” (bei’ Müller) and the people are called Mlinarjevi (plural form). It is also almost certain that someone with an unofficial name “Mlinar” has some ancestors that were operating a mill, at least a hundred years ago, etc, who lived in that same house.
And it’s not only in this village like that, but it is kinda oldfashioned and you need to go to rural places to find it. We also have wooden plates on the houses here, that have the unofficial names on them, beside the street number plate.
We have inofficial first names.
Naming custom is you name a child the full name of a relative. Generally you start with grandparents, like first girl will get the maternal grandmother’s name, second girl paternal grandmother’s, first boy paternal grandfather’s, second boy maternal grandfather’s, and then you can go on to (great-grand)parent’s or aunts and uncles or something. Some families/regions may switch paternal and maternal orders around and I think Catholics may have a different tradition. Full names are often longer more formal and/or biblical names but they don’t have to be.
Example: Hendrik Cornelis and Johanna Elizabeth have a son and daughter, who they called Willem Johannes and Anna Jacoba after their respective father and mother. Willem Johannes has a son and calls him Hendrik Cornelis. Anna Jacoba has a daughter and calls her Johanna Elizabeth. And so on. These names are generally referred to as “doopnamen”, baptismal names, and are the names that get registered with the government and are on your passport and taxes and so on.
But obviously it would get confusing if everybody has the same name as multiple people in their family so that’s where “roepnamen”, “call names”, come in. They’re names that are generally derived from one of their formal names. So the people I mentioned would likely not be called Hendrik, Johanna, Willem, Anna, Hendrik and Johanna. But something like Henk, Jans, Wim, Anneke, Rick and Janine. Or Kees, Els, Jan, Coby, Corné and Elise. Using ’30s-’60s-’90s names as examples here. Willem Johannes might be called Jan-Willem or Wim-Jan, Johanna Elizabeth Annelies or Lisanne, etc.
Most people never use their doopnamen for anything other than official documents and occasions. Everybody is referred to by their roepnaam virtual everywhere and by everyone. And unless you process said official documents you generally have no idea what people’s actual legal names are beyond an educated guess. I know the doopnaam of probably less than a dozen people, all either close relatives or friends. The tradition is becoming less and less common though as people increasingly just choose names they like for their kids rather than work around finding names that fit with grandma’s doopnaam.
For sure!
My brother lived with our grandma during weekdays in the middle school because he went to school in her village and there was no direct public transport. His name is S.P. Now he was called Fanouš D. After grandpa and their house name from… grandpa’s granparents or something. Even though grandpa’s surname wasn’t D anymore.
Or my two uncles’ families, the same village, the same surname so everyone calls them by house numbers.
Gårdsnamn (farm names) are pretty common in northern Sweden and especially in Dalarna. There might be a man named Anders Olsson who lives in the Hjort farm. He would be referred to as Hjort Anders or Hjort Anders Olsson. If he moved to the Backa farm, his name would change to Backa Anders Olsson.
This was very common more than 100 years ago, but it had been making a resurgence.
It’s rare but still happens. It confused the hell out of me when visiting my grandparents back in the day.
Some may be noble family crest names, some random nick names, some based on first name of head of the family or most hilarious one – if the wife is the head of the family, but she is known by her relation to her housband the whole family will be called this way eg. woman is a wife of guy named Piotr, she may be refered to as “Piotowa” (of Piotr) and the estate could be refered to as Piotrowa’s farm. Full incognito : D
Yes. Families with common surnames sometimes have a cognomen to differentiate them from other families. Ryan and O’Dwyer are common family names in Tipperary so there’s a family called O’Dwyer Bob and the Ryan Coopers and Ryan O’Connors.
It is definitely common in rural Galicia, at least. The naming format I’ve seen is usually “Firstname of Nickname” where the nickname could be the name of their village, or their house, or often just a word that’s associated with the family for some reason.
For example “Manolo do Francés” (Manolo of the French[man]) would be a man named Manolo whose family is known as “the French” or “the Frenches” because generations ago a French man married into the family and that was the most notable thing about them at the time.
I live in the UK, I was born in the UK. My ancestry goes back to the Anglo Saxons. There are a lot of British names that came about due to the jobs that the people did at the time. Her is a list of some of them…… Curtesy of Google. Thank you Google…….
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Occupation Surnames
Occupational surnames cover all the common occupations of Mediaeval Europe: agricultural, manufacturing and retail with surnames like Bacon (pork butcher), Baker, Brewer, Cheesman, Cooper, Fisher, Fletcher (arrowmaker), Gardiner, Glover, Ironmonger, Kellogg (‘kill hog’ a pork butcher), Mason, Miller, Slater, Spicer, Spurrier (spur maker), Tapper (wine merchant, also weaver of carpets), Turner, Woodward (in charge of forests). Those who made things include a long list with the suffixes -maker like Bowmaker, Shoemaker, and Slaymaker (shuttles for weavers), and -wright, mainly workers in wood, such as Arkwright (chests), Boatwright, Cartwright, Shipwright and Wainwright (wagons) who featured prominently in the local scene. A herd looked after animals as in Calvert (calves), Cowherd or Coward (cows), Goddard (goats), Neatherd (oxen), Shepherd (sheep), Stoddard (stud of horses), and Swinnart (swine) and the generic Heard, Herd, and Hird. The importance of the English wool trade is indicated by the number of surnames coming from it. Weaver, Webb, Webber and Webster were involved in weaving. Those who treated woollen cloth have given us three surnames, Fuller, Tucker, and Walker, as these were the dialect terms in the south and east, the southwest, and the west and north respectively. Dying cloth is represented by Dexter, Dyer and Lister, also from different dialects. Card, Kempster, and Tozer were part of the carding process, and Sherman would have sheared either the sheep or the finished cloth. Most of them were used as surnames but many have died out. Another book that usefully classifies and lists a huge number of surnames from occupations is Dolan, however his historical and genealogical information has many inaccuracies, and the presentation is glib.
Yes, *malnoms*, literally “bad names”. They’re inherited usually by “resemblance” to one family side or the other, as they’re associated to physical or personality traits; thus two brothers can have different *malnoms*, or they can skip a generation or two because you’re the living image of your great-grandpa. Some are very recent, some have survived for centuries.
I think the tradition of house names still exists to some extent in rural parts of Bavaria, but tbh I don’t know anyone here by their house name.
My ex GF is from a farm in upper Austria and back then I knew half the village by their house name.
My grandfather was the last of us living on a farm, but since I don’t live there I guess I can’t call myself “Unterschachtner”. Which would be kinda cool.