American Language Supplement 2 (82 page)

Howard F. Barker estimates that only about a third of present-day Americans have English surnames by virtue of English blood in the male line, but to them, of course, must be added the large numbers whose ancestors acquired such names in Scotland, Wales or Ireland, the perhaps even larger numbers who have adopted English surnames in place of non-British names, and the Negroes. Counting in variants, about 35,000 native surnames are in use in England, but the number is less in the United States, for there has been a tendency here since the earliest days, save only in New England, to abandon unusual forms and spellings for commoner and more familiar ones. Thus
Leigh
and
Lea
have been largely absorbed by
Lee, Davies
by
Davis
,
²
Cowper
by
Cooper, Baillie
by
Bailey, Forster
by
Foster, Colquhoun
by
Calhoun
, and
Smyth
and
Smythe
by
Smith. Baker, Carter
and
Moore
, no doubt because they are short and easy to remember, are relatively more frequent in this country than in England, and have probably engulfed various similar names,
e.g., More, Mohr
and
Muir. Parker
and
Hall
hold their own among us, maybe for much the same reasons.
³
Barker notes several general tendencies that seem to be peculiar to the United States. One wars upon final
e
, so that
Browne
and
Greene
become
Brown
and
Green
. Another lops off the -
son
ending, so that
Harris
runs far ahead of
Harrison
. A third adds a final
s
to various short names, so that
Hay
becomes
Hayes, Brook
becomes
Brooks
and
Stephen
becomes
Stevens
.
⁴
A fourth converts such difficult endings as -
borough, -holme
and
-thwaite
into simple forms,
e.g., -bury, -om
(as in
Newsom
from
Newsholme
) and
-white
. Many Americans of Scottish
ancestry have dropped the
Mac
from their names, and many Irish families that came in as
Mc’s
or
O’s
have similarly abandoned the prefixes. Barker says that
Mack
and
Gill
, which are much more common in the United States than in Great Britain, “serve as substitutes or contractions for a host of ‘hard’ Irish names,” such as
McGillicuddy, Mcllhatton
, and
McGeoghegan
. The Welsh form seen in
ap Lloyd, i.e., son of Lloyd
, is almost unknown here, though it survives in Wales. But in such vestigial forms as
Floyd, Bowen, Powell, Price, Pumphrey, Pugh, Prichard
and
Upjohn
, from
ap Lloyd, ap Owen, ap Howell, ap Rhys, ap Humphrey, ap Hugh, ap Richard
and
ap John
, it flourishes.
¹

The earliest known list of English surnames comes from the Pipe Roll of 1159–60. Ewen says that no less than 94% of the persons listed had them in some form or other. Of these names, 5% indicated racial extraction, 35% were geographical, 19% were occupational, 21% showed descent, and 14% remained unidentifiable. The first Irish names are recorded in documents nearly three centuries older than the Pipe Rolls, and many of them are still common,
e.g., O’Connor, O’Donnell, O’Neill, O’Loughlin, O’Donovan
and
O’Brien
.
²
Since the setting up of the Irish Free State (Saorstat Eireann) on January 15, 1922,
³
and indeed since the dawn of the Irish Literary Renaissance,
c
. 1890, there has been a fashion among Irish politicians and literati for reviving the ancient Gaelic forms of both surnames and given-names, and as a result such forbidding examples as
MacEochain
(
Geoghegan
),
O Tuathail
(
O’Toole
),
MacSuibhne
(
McSweeney
),
OSuileabhain
(
O’Sullivan
),
Omarchadha
(
Murphy
) and
O Muircheartaigh
(
Moriarty
) now spot the Irish newspapers, but in America this romantic but somewhat absurd
affectation has found very few imitators.
¹
The public records of Scotland, with few exceptions, do not go back in time beyond the beginning of the Fourteenth Century, and as a result the study of Scottish surnames, many of them common in America, is full of difficulties. But George F. Black, a Scottish-American scholar, has tackled those difficulties ingeniously and pertinaciously in a book that is one of the best works on surnames ever published.
²

It shows that many familiar Scottish names are not Gaelic in origin, but Norman, English, Flemish, Danish or Irish.
Carlisle
, for example, comes from the name of the town in England,
Bruce
is a French territorial name, and
Macaulay
is from the Norse. There is little assurance, when an indubitable Scot sports an ancient and famous surname, that his arteries run blood of the clan to which he apparently belongs. The plain people of the early days simply took the names of the bloodletters whose banners they followed, and not infrequently they changed their names as they switched clans. During the early Seventeenth Century, a time of great turmoil in Scotland, so many ruffians thus enrolled themselves as
MacGregors
that an act was passed on April 3, 1603, abolishing that surname altogether, and making its use a capital offense. Many of the bogus
MacGregors
thereupon took other names – those of Perth, for example, announced that “in all tyme heirefter” they would “tak to thame and call thameselffis the name of
Johnnestoun
” —,
⁸
but the overwhelming majority resisted the law, and in 1661 it was suspended by King Charles II. A generation later the MacGregors took to the bush again, and in 1693 the law was reënacted, but the bearers of the name continued to cling to it and during the Eighteenth Century not a few of them came to America, bringing it along.
⁴
But most of their descendants are probably no more related
to the King Giric who is said to have founded the clan,
c
. 900, nor even to that later chief who boasted that wherever he sat was the head of the table, than Booker T.
Washington
was related to George. Other famous Scottish names attracted recruits in the same wholesale manner, notably
Stewart, Campbell
and
MacDonald
. Thousands of the proscribed
MacGregors
became
MacDonalds
, and to this day
MacDonald
is the most common of all surnames in Scotland, next to
Smith
. Even in the United States it ranks above such familiar English names as
Barnes, Ellis, Ford, Graham
and
James
. As for
Campbell
, it outranks
Mitchell, Turner, Cook
and
Lee
. As for
Stewart
in its various forms, it is ahead of
Ward, Rogers
and
Edwards
and on a par with
Parker
and
Morris
.

The first non-British immigrants to appear along the Atlantic seaboard in considerable numbers were the Dutch, who settled on Manhattan island in 1613 and held most of what is now New York until 1664. They occupied a large part of Long Island and nearly the whole valley of the Hudson, and also spilled into New Jersey, but even in the earliest days their hegemony was challenged by Frenchmen and Englishmen, to say nothing of Swedes and Germans. Marcus L. Hansen estimates
¹
that by 1790 there were but 55,000 persons of Dutch descent in New York in a total population of 314,366. Many of these Dutch had retained their native names,
e.g., Schuyler, Schermerhorn, Stuyvesant
and
Ten Eyck
, and some had even enforced the true Dutch pronunciation thereof, but many others had been compelled to yield to the pressure of English speechways. An example is offered by the
Van Kouwenhoven
family, whose progenitor, Wolphert Gerretse of that ilk, arrived in America in 1625. Some of his descendants retain the family name to this day, but others first changed
Kouwenhoven
to
Couwenhoven
, and then proceeded from
Couwenhoven
to
Cowenhoven, Cowan, Konover
and
Conover
.
²
In the same way, no doubt, many
a
Gerretse
became a
Garrett
, many a
Vosmaer
became a
Foster
and perhaps even some of the
Stuyvesants
became
Stevensons
. The carnage of names closely resembling English forms,
e.g., Smid, Visscher, Jong, Prins
and
Kuiper
, must have been great indeed: it is still great among the later Dutch of Michigan.
¹
Says a correspondent who is a descendant of Hudson Valley pioneers:

Sometimes, of course, the thing ran the other way, and it is highly probable that some of the early English settlers assumed Dutch names. Indeed, there is record of one named
Marston
, whose descendants became distinguished under the Dutch-sounding name of
Masten
.
⁴
I have also heard of an
O’Dell
family descended from a Hollander named
Odle
or something of the sort. French names were not uncommon among the early Dutch, and they were reinforced by the names of settlers who were really Frenchmen,
e.g., Demarest
(
Des Marest
),
Deronde
(
DuRonde
) and
Harcourt
. Despite the grandiose social pretensions of some of their descendants, not many of the Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam were of gentle blood: the great majority of them, like the great majority of all other groups of immigrants, were farmers, traders and mechanics. The
Van
in
the names of so many of them is not to be confused with the German
von
, which connotes the
Adelstand
.
¹
Readers of Alexander W. Thayer’s monumental life of Beethoven will recall that poor Ludwig, during one of his litigations in Vienna, had to confess on the stand that the
Van
before his name did not indicate noble blood, and that he was thus not entitled to trial in the courts reserved for the nobility. In the United States some of the persons of Dutch descent have sought to enhance their status by writing the
Van
of their names as
van
, but the rest take it lightly, and many of them amalgamate it with other particles or with the stem or with both,
e.g., Vanderbilt, Vandenberg, Vander Veer
or
Vanderveer
(sometimes reduced to
Vandeveer
or
Vandiver
),
Vandergrift
and
Vandervelde. Van de Venter
also appears as
Van Deventer
and
Vandeventer
and
Van Nuys
as
Vannuys
or
Vannice
. Many other families have dropped the
Van
altogether, notably the
Roosevelts
, who were originally
Van Roosevelts
.
²
The sonorous names borne by latter-day Hollanders of aristocratic pretensions,
e.g
., A. F. H.
Troostenburg de Bruyn
, George
van Tets van Goudriaan
and A. W. L.
Tjarda van Starenburgh Stockouwer
,
³
are quite unknown among Dutch-Americans.
Jansen
, a common Dutch surname, probably made heavy contributions to the multitude of American
Johnsons
.
⁴

The Germans were the first immigrants to undergo this name-changing process on a really large scale. They were represented in the colonies of John Smith in Virginia, of the Dutch in New York and of the Swedes on the Delaware, but the first whole shipload of them to arrive landed in 1683. After that they came in increasing numbers, chiefly to Pennsylvania, and by the middle of the Eighteenth Century they or their children made up a third of the population of the province. But the Quakers and so-called Scotch Irish had been ahead of them, and when their names were enrolled as the laws of the time required the enrolling officials made a dreadful mess of the business. Nearly all the newcomers spoke rustic dialects
of German and many of them were illiterate, so the difficulty of recording their true surnames, in numerous cases, amounted to impossibility. There were, for example, the frequent names in
bach
, including
Bach
alone. The German
ch
-sound did not daunt the Celtic jobholders, for, as Barker has suggested, it existed in their own speech, but in that speech it was often spelled
gh
, as in
MacLaughlin, Dougherty
and
McCullough
, so it was turned into
gh
on the records, and there thus arose the innumerable
Baughs, Baughmans, Harbaughs, Ebaughs
(
Ebach
or
Ibach
) and the like.