Trace a Family Name History

Family name projects start with surnames.

You can easily trace a family name history, even if you don't have the time, or inclination to trace the genealogy of each of your ancestors.

Learning from Family Names and Histories

Genealogy is an extremely popular hobby in the United States. Participants enjoy the challenge of finding information on their ancestors, the fun of learning about where their family members lived and getting a feel for how history might have affected where their ancestors lived or traveled.

Some people, however, want to know a little about the history of their ancestors without the full time commitment of a genealogy project. They may be interested in the origin of their family name, where their ancestors probably came from and a little information about the popularity of their family name. These people are looking for ways to trace a family name history.

Family name histories provide their own unique way to review the history of a family name. They should not be thought of as "light genealogy." A family name history certainly doesn't provide the depth of information which can be gained by a full genealogical search; however, a family name history search can provide some perspective which could be interesting information to family members who aren't interested in who married who or who lived in which town. The family name history provides a top line history of a person's most personal possession, their name.

Reasons to Trace a Family Name History

A family name history search can be a very quick way to determine many of the factors that interest a person about their ancestry such as:

  • The country from which the family probably originated
  • The world events and history that may have caused the family ancestors to immigrate to the United States or move throughout the states
  • The possible point of entry of the family ancestors

Searching a family name's history search can be particularly interesting to a child who is eager to learn about their family name. Some schools have an ancestry event at school where the kids work with their parents to construct the basic limbs of their family tree. Kids often create family trees diagrams with the names of their immediate ancestors such as their parents, grandparents and great grandparents. Concentrating on the names of the ancestors can also be a more positive first step for adopted kids to identify with their new family name versus a full genealogy project that concentrates on the details of each ancestor.

Projects: Tracing Family Names

Tracing a family name can be as easy as entering your family name into a website on the Internet. There are many websites providing history and information on family names. Most of the websites are using the same information and assumptions about the origin of various family names. Some websites combine the basic origin information with actual data from family trees of people with the family name. Since family name research is meant to be general research, you should think twice about paying for specific research into a specific family name.

Two websites, FamilyEducation.com and Ancestry.com, do a particularly good job at presenting very interesting free research on family names.

FamilyEducation.com

At FamilyEducation.com you can quickly learn the origin and meaning of a family name. All you need to do is just enter your family name. For example, if you enter "Johnson" the system tells you that the name "Johnson:"

  • Has an English and Scottish origin
  • Is derived from the name "John," such as a name to note the person as the son of John
  • Was brought to North America starting in the 17th and 18th centuries
  • Is the second most popular surname in the United States

Ancestry.com

Ancestry.com combines basic family name research with the specific research data which Ancestry.com has gathered from the thousands of family trees on their website.

  • Name distribution - Six states had more than 10,280 Johnson families in 1920. Three counties in England and Wales were the primary source of Johnson families in 1891.
  • Place of origin - Immigration records show that immigrants who came to New York were most likely to come from Sweden and England.
  • Meaning and history - The name is of English and Scottish origin
  • Immigration year - A graph shows the actual number of Johnsons who immigrated to the United States in each decade from 1851 to 1891. By clicking on a specific year, you can see the names of all Johnsons who immigrated to New York in that specific year.
  • Ports of departure - A pie chart shows that 67 percent of Johnsons departed from Liverpool England and Queenstown, Ireland.
  • Life expectancy - A graph shows the average life expectancy of a person with the name "Johnson" as compared to the life expectancy of people with other family names.
  • Occupations - A graph shows that farming was the top occupation for those with the Johnson name in living in the United States in 1880
  • Civil War - A chart shows that about a third of the Johnsons fought as Confederates with the remaining two-thirds fighting for the Union.

Don't need to take on a full-scale genealogy hobby in order to trace your family name history. A family name history project can be a fun family project.