American Language Supplement 2 (91 page)

On the heels of this came the general spread of life insurance, a powerful stabilizing force. Men who had carried $10,000 in insurance during the war were prone to take out at least a few thousand in civil life. Thereby they again wrote themselves down as being specifically
Houlihan, Holohan
or
Holoughan
, and stayed that way. Then came the automobile registration. Automobiles not only changed the face of the American landscape; they also went a long way toward stopping changes of family names. Automobile titles soon constituted a formidable body of property records, and annual licenses reinforced them. Every million cars meant another million families named for good. After some years came Social Security, and it was soon followed by other like devices, each involving the registration of millions of names. By 1940 American family nomenclature was vastly more stable than it had been in 1910, or even in 1920.
⁴

1
I am indebted here to Mr. Max Stern, director of the Informational Service of the Social Security Board.

2
AL4, p. 477.

3
Johnston
was originally territorial –
John’s ton. Ton, tun, toun, toune
and
tone
meant a farm, manor, parish or other well-defined piece of land. The founder of the
Johnston
(
e
) clan gave his name to lands in Annandale, Dumfriesshire,
c
. 1174. In the early days the name was frequently confused with
Jonson
or
Johnson
. Black gives a list of 16 variant spellings, including
Jhonestowne, Johanstoun, Johngston, Johnnesone, Joneston, Johnstoun
and
Joniston
.

1
Washington dispatch in the Baltimore
Evening Sun
, March 8, 1944.

2
The Linguist Anthology; New York, 1945, p. 51.

3
Associated Press dispatch from Washington, Feb. 23, 1946. The resultant confusion gave a headache of high amperage to General Omar N. Bradley, the administrator, and he smote his bloomin’ lyre on the subject in a speech to the American Veterans of World War II, meeting in Washington.

1
I am indebted for this table and for much else to Mr. Howard F. Barker, one of the committee’s research associates and the foremost authority on American surnames.

1
This is on the authority of the NED, Vol. X, Part I, p. 278. In Icelandic
smithur
is still used in the sense of “blacksmith, carpenter, builder.” See Icelandic: Grammar, Texts, Glossary, by Stefan Einarsson; Baltimore, 1945, p. 450. Samuel Grant Oliphant, in his otherwise instructive The Clan of Fire and Forge, or, The Ancient and Honorable
Smiths;
Olivet, Mich., 1910, p. 6, falls into the error of restricting the original meaning of
smith
to “the worker in metals.”

2
The Inconvenience of Being Named
Smith
, April, pp. 498–504. This article was signed John Smith, but the
Galaxy’s
index credited it to Col. Nicholas Smith.

3
For the British ranking of names see the
World
Almanac for 1914, p. 668. The report of the Registrar-General for Scotland for 1937; Edinburgh, 1938, pp. lvi and lvii, shows that the ten leading names in Scotland in 1860 were
Smith, MacDonald, Brown, Wilson, Thomson, Robertson, Campbell, Stewart, Anderson
and
Johnston
, and that in 1935
Smith, MacDonald
and
Brown
still held the first three places.

4
Six More Listed Surnames, New York
Sun
, Oct. 6, 1943.

5
Said Leigh Hunt in The Seer, XXXVII, 1840: “An Italian poet says he hates his name of
John
(
Giovanni
) because if anybody calls him by it in the street twenty people loot out of the window. Now let anybody call ‘
John Smith
’ and half Holborn will cry out ‘Well?’ ” Said the once famous Fanny Fern (Sara Payson Willis Parton): “When Adam got tired of naming his numerous descendants he said, ‘Let all the rest be called
Smith
.’ ” (Fanny Fern: a Memorial Volume, edited by James Parton; New York, 1873, p. 208.) Said the
New Yorker
, March 2, 1940: “Moving into one of those apartment buildings that are supplied with electricity by a contracting company which buys juice from Edison and meters it out to individuals, a Mr. Levy was surprised and hurt, since he always pays his bills before the tenth of the month, to get a request for a ten-dollar deposit. He made a fuss about it, and finally a representative of the company called upon him to explain. ‘Whenever we get a new customer named
Smith, Brown, Cohen, Jones, Levy
, or
Johnson
, we always ask for a deposit,’ he said. ‘It’s too much bother to look up their credit ratings.’ ” Said Anthony L. Ellis in Prisoner at the Bar; London, 1934, p. 25: “In all the wide vocabulary of the English language are there two words which, conjointly, suggest a finer guarantee of simple faith than the name
John Smith?
The words are the embodiment of honesty, of purpose, the epitome of rugged sincerity and truth.” But enough of this Smithiana.

1
An investigation undertaken in 1933 by clients of the Emergency Unemployment Relief Committee showed that the lead of
Cohen
in Brooklyn, at least among telephone subscribers, was then tremendous. There were 11,314
Cohens
listed, to 6,817
Smiths
, 5,614
Millers
, 4,384
Browns
and 2,005
Joneses
. See 11,314 Brooklyn
Cohens
, New York
Sun
, Feb. 28, 1933.

2
Our Leading Surnames, by Howard F. Barker,
American Speech
June, 1926, pp. 470–77.

3
I am indebted here to Mr. Daniel Litscher of Grand Rapids.

1
Believe It or Not, by R. L. Ripley, Buffalo
Evening News
, Aug. 25, 1936.

2
In the English Who’s Who, in 1937, there were 98
Davieses
and but 31
Davises;
in the American Who’s Who there were 163
Davises
and but 14
Davieses
. I am indebted here to Mr. Roger Howson, of New York.

3
Hall, Parker
, and Company, Surnames, by Howard F. Barker.
American Speech
, Aug., 1926, pp. 596–607.

4
“Surnames [in
-son
]” says Louise Pound,
American Speech
, April, 1936, p. 187, “occur often with a simple
s
and those who come to know such forms first remain eternally oblivious of divergences. The added
s
need not be thought of as a plural sign. Usually it is an old possessive patronymic ending.”

1
It is dealt with in A History of Surnames of the British Isles, by C. L’Estrange Ewen; New York, 1931, pp. 206–08 and 255. “In Wales,” adds Ewen, “there is little variety among native surnames, since they are nearly all of the genealogical class, and in order to add distinction a custom has grown of bestowing the mother’s maiden name as a Christian name, and for the subsequent generation to couple the two by hyphen.” David
Lloyd George
, the politician, got his surname by this route. His father was a
George
and his mother a
Lloyd
. He never used a hyphen, but always insisted that his surname was
Lloyd George
, not simply
George
.

2
Irish Names and Surnames, by Patrick Woulfe; Dublin, 1923, pp. xvi-xx. Ireland, says Woulfe, “was the first country after the fall of the Western Empire to adopt hereditary surnames.”

3
The name was changed to Eire on Dec. 29, 1937.

1
Many examples are in Woulfe’s Irish Names and Surnames, lately cited, pp. 55–161. The
O
is never separated from the name by an apostrophe. Either it stands alone or it joins the next capital without a space. The
Mac
is always separated. The feminine form is
Ni
.

2
The Surnames of Scotland; Their Origin, Meaning, and History; New York, 1946. Black was born at Stirling, Scotland, in 1865, and after taking his degree at Edinburgh entered the service of the Scottish National Museum of Antiquities. In 1896 he joined the staff of the New York Public Library, where he remained for thirty-five years.

3
Others joined the clans of
Stewart, Grant, Dougall, Ramsay
and
Cunninghame
.

4
The act was finally repealed in 1784. By 1863, according to the Annual Report of the Registrar-General of Scotland, by James Stark, quoted in the Report of the Committee on Linguistic and National Stocks of the American Council of Learned Societies, before cited, p. 211, there were 10,000 of them again at large on the old soil.

1
The Minor Stocks in the American Population, in the Report of the Committee on Linguistic and National Stocks in the Population of the United States, before cited, p. 370.

2
300
Van Kouwenhoven
Descendants Visit Fair, New York
Herald Tribune
, Sept. 2, 1939. See also The Descendants of Wolphert Gerretse van
Kouwenhoven
Through His Son, Jacob Wolfertsen van
Couwenhoven
, by Lincoln C. Cocheu; New York, 1943.

1
AL4, p. 485.

2
Represented by twelve entries in the Manhattan telephone directory, Summer-Fall, 1946.

3
Mr. Everett DeBaun, private communication, Jan. 23, 1945. For
Long-street
and
Pennypacker
see AL4, p. 480. For other Dutch names see The Origin and Meaning of English and Dutch Surnames of New York State Families, by George Rogers Howell, a paper read before the Albany Institute, May 15, 1894, and later printed as a pamphlet. This pamphlet is in the New York Public Library.

4
Marston
is an English territorial name, meaning the town on the marsh, and is traced to 1273 by Charles Wareing Bardsley in A Dictionary of English and Welsh Surnames; London, 1901, p. 517.

1
This is true, of course, only when it is written with a small
v
. The capitalized
Von
is no more significant than the Dutch
Van
.

2
AL4, p. 480, n. 2.

3
The first was once secretary of the Netherlands legation at Washington, the second was private secretary to Queen Wilhelmina, and the third was governor-general of the Netherlands East Indies.

4
AL4, p. 477. See also pp. 479, 481 and 485.

1
Before cited, p. 288.

2
Saint Paul’s Lutheran Church of Arcadia, Baltimore County, in the report of the Society for the History of Germans in Maryland; Baltimore, 1929, p. 27.

3
Anglicized and Corrupted German Names in Virginia, by Herman Schuricht,
Pennsylvania-German
, Vol. XII, 1911, pp. 305 and 306.

4
Orthographic and Phonological Changes in the German Surnames of Potosi, Wisconsin, by Elda O. Baumann. This paper, which was read before the Modern Language Association, is unpublished, but I have had access to it by the courtesy of the author.

5
pp. 482–85.

6
AL4, p. 480.

7
The cases of the composers
Glück
and
Händel
are familiar. For
Händel
see
Handel
, by Herbert Weinstock; New York, 1946, p. xiii.

1
In 1914
Snyder
was forty-sixth in frequency among Philadelphia names, outranking
Wood, Hall
and
Burns
, and standing close to
Jackson, Harris
and
Collins
.

2
I take most of these from Pennsylvania German Family Names, by L. Oscar Kuhns; New York, 1902. The original form of a name often survives alongside a translation, transliteration or respelling. In 1947 General Dwight D.
Eisenhower
, G. C. B., flourished in Washington and Miss Thelma von
Eisenhauer
, a talented soprano, in Detroit, and there were
Isenhours
in Minnesota.

3
Orthographical and Phonological Changes in the German Surnames of Potosi, Wisconsin, lately cited.

1
Dutchified Surnames, Allentown (Pa.)
Morning Call
, Sept. 21, 1946.

2
Mr. Clyde V.
Moyers
, of Birmingham, Ala. (private communication, Aug. 16, 1946), tells me that his surname is pronounced
Meyers
.

1
Yoder notes that “later Amish immigrants in Ohio and elsewhere spell this name
Noffsker
.”

2
Recorded by Heintze as a variant of
Georg
.

3
Hanover (Pa.)
Sun
, Aug. 16, 1942: “One hundred and four were present … when the annual
Swartz-Black
reunion was held.”

4
Death notice in the Baltimore
Sun
, Oct. 23, 1942.

5
History and Genealogy of the Leibensperger Family, by Elmer I. Leibensperger; Reading (Pa.), 1943.

6
Milledulcia: A Thousand Pleasant Things From
Notes & Queries;
New York, 1857, p. 34. I am indebted here to Mr, Huntington Cairns.

1
I take these Maryland examples from Saint Paul’s Lutheran Church, before cited.

2
George
Westinghouse
, by Albert B. Faust,
American-German Review
, Aug., 1945, p. 6.

3
Bricker
of Ohio, by Karl B. Pauly; New York, 1944, p. 15.

4
Billy
Sunday:
His Tabernacles and Sawdust Trails, by Theodore Thomas Frankenberg; Columbus (O.), 1917. p. 27.

5
Cousin of Buffalo Bill Dies Here at Age of 94, Baltimore
Sun
, March 23, 1936.

6
Public Men In and Out of Office, by J. L. Salter; Chapel Hill (N.C.), 1946, p. 54.

7
Deutsche Namen in Amerika, by Stephan Kekule von Stradonitz,
B.Z. am Mittag
, Sept. 22, 1927.

8
His mother’s surname was
Bowermaster
, possibly from
Bauermeister
.

1
Dr. T. G. Pullen, Jr., State Superintendent of Education of Maryland, tells me that he has been so informed by a member of the Boone family.

2
The First 100 Years, published by the Perkins-Goodwin Company, New York, 1946, p. 11.

3
Pal
Moore
, Ex-Boxer, Dies at Age of 52, Baltimore
Sun
, Dec. 23, 1943. For many others see The German Element in the United States, by A. B. Faust; New York, 1909.

4
The Settlement of the German Coast of Louisiana and the Creoles of German Descent, by J. Hanno Deiler,
German American Annals
, July and August, 1909, pp. 194–97.

5
Deutsche Familiennamen unter fremden Völkern, by Stephen Kekule von Stradonitz,
Mitteilungen der Akademie zur Wissenschaftlichen Erforshung
, April-May, 1928, pp. 901–15.