A few signs that a surname reveals more about ancestors than one might think

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The surname is, first of all, a small story about which family we belong to, it is a marker of the relationship of several different people. However, the last name can be understood more than some Ivan Ilyich and Nikolai Ivanovich Toporkov - father and son to each other. Some surnames tell a piece of family history.

It is obligatory to designate the family

From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, inclusive in Russia, a number of decrees were issued ordering representatives of different estates and ethnic groups to obtain or fix a surname without fail. Of the Russians, princes and boyars were the first to receive surnames, and peasants were the last to receive surnames after the abolition of serfdom.

Patronymic names often turned into surnames - that is, indications of what kind of father you are a son (Ivanov, Petrov, Sidorov). As for women, until very recently, they were ordered to have the same surname as their husbands, so that they bore the surname as a sign of consanguinity only in childhood. A surname could be made as a description of what a person's father is known for in a village or city - his kind of employment. These are surnames like Plotnikov, Shapochnikov, Kuznetsov, Kalashnikov (from the word "kalachnik", pronounced in the Moscow way).

Noble lineage. Or not

There is a legend that all the surnames in "-sky", formed from the name of a place (Vyazemsky, Belozersky, Baryatinsky, and so on) are noble, in the place that once belonged to a family of noble birth. In some cases, this is so, but the surname was received locally and simply by people from there, even of the lowest origin. Not every "geographical" surname in "-skiy" is noble. Whether she is noble can be seen in the lists of noble families by provinces, which were compiled before the revolution (many of them were digitized and posted on the Internet). But the coincidence with the surname from the noble genealogy book does not mean anything: sometimes, after liberation from the fortress, the peasant took the surname of his master.

Ancestor Priest

It is usually easiest to determine whether a priest was among the great-grandfathers. In Russia, there are several dozen so-called seminary surnames - that is, surnames that graduates of the theological school took for themselves. They are often associated with major Christian holidays: Rozhdestvensky, Uspensky, Voznesensky. Some graduates changed their surnames, literally translating the root into Greek or Latin, for euphony: the Bobrovs turned into Kastorskys, the Veselovs into Gilyarovskys, and so on.

Another feature of the church surname is when from a word ending in "-a", contrary to all the rules of the Russian language, a surname was formed not in "-in", but in "-ov": Nagradov, Fialkov, Muzov. In addition, surnames with a root in the form of any popular name in its Greek form belong to the seminary: Ioannov instead of Ivanov, Illarionov instead of Larionov.

The change of surname for students and graduates of seminaries was not limited to anything, and as a result, siblings could have different surnames. Some seminary surnames may seem very familiar to you: Veltistov, Livanov, Annensky, Speransky, Gumilyov, Kustodiev. It is also easy to see if your last name belongs to the seminary one - there is a list of them on the Internet, but confusion is possible. Some seminarian-looking surnames were given to people who were far from the spiritual title - by the name of the parish in which they were baptized (for orphans and those who had changed their faith) or the village, whose name is similar to the name of a church holiday. In addition, some seminary surnames coincide with Hebrew, because the root is the name of a character from the Bible.

Ancestor nationality

Sometimes the surname of a completely Russian person can be formed from the name that was used by people of a certain nationality, or words in another language. These are, for example, surnames from Jewish female names - Raikin, Blumkin, Rivkin. There are a number of surnames that a couple of hundred years ago ended in the typical Armenian "-yan", but over time the speakers decided to slightly Russify the sound so as not to attract attention - for example, these are the names of the Vaganovs, Shunikovs, Karapetovs, Bagdasarovs, Agamirovs.

There are many surnames with clearly Tatar roots. They met even among the Russian nobility, to say nothing of immigrants from the Tatars, who once were baptized. Tatar roots of surnames like Urazov, Fateev, Baksheev, Beketov, Suvorov, Bazarov, Bulgakov. However, it must be remembered that there are many Turkisms in the Russian language, and during the time of the Golden Horde and immediately after there were even more of them, so that the Tatar surname by its root could come from the nickname of a person who had no Tatar roots.

Some surnames can definitely be said to have come from Polish territories - especially if they end in "-skiy" and contain the combination of letters "rzh", "bzh", "dz" and "ck" at the root. Yastrzhemsky, Razdzievsky, Dzerzhinsky, Mitskovsky - all of these are typical for territories dominated by Poles, surnames. Moreover, the real ethnicity of their carriers could be very different - it could be Jews, Belarusians, Lithuanians and even resettled Serbs.

The surnames of the German root may be from the descendants of ethnic Germans or Jews who speak Yiddish. If they have a surname in -ov, then usually we do not think that the root in them is not Russian. Here are some examples of such names: Furmanov, Shultsev, Vitsin. In addition, in the coastal lands of Prussia, surnames with -ov, often of Slavic root, were popular (because many Prussian families were Germanized Slavic families of the Baltic coast). Badrov, Beskov, Krasov - these surnames can be of both Prussian and ordinary Russian origin. Take a peek at a list of Prussian noble families sometime to be amazed at how Slavic many of them sound.

Foreigners were noted in Russian culture quite extensively: The Germans are the leaders of the Russian Slavophiles, or where did the name Svetlana and the myth of Old Russian Sanskrit come from?.