![]() Some surnames derive from personal traits or looks, such as Armstrong, Swift, Red and Short. ![]() ![]() Irish, Welsh and Highland Scottish names mostly derive from Gaelic personal names whereas traditional English and lowland Scottish surnames also reflect society as it was in the mid to late Middle Ages.Ĭommon surnames such as Smith, Wright, Fletcher, Knight, Cook, Squire, Taylor and Turner are all based around medieval trades or occupations. Today there are perhaps as many as 45,000 different English surnames, derived from all kinds of sources: nicknames, physical attributes, trades, place names etc. However it was still common in some parts of the country to find a person entered under one surname at baptism, married under another name and then buried under a third. The introduction of parish registers in 1538 helped establish the idea of hereditary surnames. For example, John Blacksmith might become John Farrier as his trade developed. To begin with, surnames were fluid and changed over time, or as a person changed his job. These descriptions would grow to form the surnames we recognise today. As the country’s population grew, it became necessary to distinguish between people and so names began to include descriptions of the person, such as Thomas son of John, Peter the Baker, Richard the Whitehead, Mary Webster, etc. Surnames weren’t widely used until after the Norman Conquest in 1066. Even among the knightly class, hereditary surnames were rare. Most people moved so little that they needed only a first name to identify themselves. By unfree, the ‘great unwashed’ were either villeins, bordars and cottars, or serfs of varying status, all bound to the land by their lords and masters. Historians generally agree that in AD1000 England about 10% of the population were slaves, the rest were unfree. In England, surnames are also commonly known as last names due to the practice of writing the given names first and then the family name or surname last. Finally, we estimate that surname prediction from a Y-chromosome haplotype, which may have interesting forensic applications, has a ~60% sensitivity but a 17% false discovery rate.Have you ever wondered where your surname comes from? Or when people start using surnames (last names) and why? We have found that, in general, a foreign etymology for a surname does not often result in a non-indigenous origin of surname founders however, bearers of some surnames with an Arabic etymology show an excess of North African haplotypes. Average ages for the founders of the surnames were estimated at ~500 years, suggesting a delay between the origin of surnames (twelfth and thirteenth centuries) and the systematization of their paternal transmission. Introgression rates of Y chromosomes into a surname by non-paternity, adoption, and transmission of the maternal surname were estimated at 1.5-2.6% per generation, with some local variation. Haplotype diversity was positively correlated with surname frequency, that is, rarer surnames showed the strongest signals of coancestry. By genotyping 17 Y-STRs and 68 SNPs in ~2500 male samples that each carried one of the 50 selected Catalan surnames, we could determine sets of descendants of a common ancestor, the population of origin of the common ancestor, and the date when such a common ancestor lived. However, socio-cultural factors, such as polyphyletism, non-paternity, adoption, or matrilineal surname transmission, may prevent the joint transmission of the surname and the Y chromosome. The biological behavior of the Y chromosome, which is paternally inherited, implies that males sharing the same surname may also share a similar Y chromosome. ![]()
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