Surname Maps

[ysabetwordsmith]

janetmiles and my partner Doug tipped me to this cool resource showing surname maps.  So, if you're a writer and you want to name an ordinary character from one of these places, you can pick a surname from the relevant place and it will fit.  This is a very discreet and effective trick with local color.

Comments

[msminlr.livejournal.com]

That World Names Project referenced on the surname map list is fascinating. I checked some of my family's surnames. On a few of them, they are more prevalent now in the USA than are left in the Old Country.

[msstacy13.livejournal.com]

Hmmm...
I'll probably google if the need arises,
but are then region-specific RNGs?
Period-specific?
Ethnic-specific?

Previously, I got names of Jewish characters
from Remarque's novel about Jewish refugees in the US,
and for the novel set in the 1850s,
I got names from slave narratives
and Uncle Tom's Cabin,
since those could be assumed accurate for time and place.
Japanese-American character names I got from
the published collection of diaries of the 100th Battalion and 442nd regiment.
(Those diaries had been confiscated by the War Department, which is how they were all preserved.)
But I'm wandering.

Another thing that's occurred to me,
and maybe you've thought of it already.
Smith is a common name because it was a common profession,
and Ferrar, Ferrari, and Kovacs, are all just Smith in another language.
Also, most surnames ending in -er are of occupational origin.
Anyway, if you've got a world you've created and a language to go with it,
whatever that word for "smith" is will probably be a common surname in the world.
Same with farmer, miller, booker, and so on...

And another thing-
Anyone named Goldsmith is probably Jewish
because Jews in Europe for centuries
were not allowed to own land,
so they tended to become money lenders,
which led to them becoming pawn brokers
which led to them becoming jewelers,
which led to so many of them being named Goldsmith.
This same thing could happen in a created world.

[ayoub.livejournal.com]

That's awesome!

Neat!

[aldersprig.livejournal.com]

That's so neat! You can notice that traveling around New York State:

Buffalo, where my husband grew up, has a very strong Polish community (the cemetary where his family is buried is Irish/Italian/Polish in about equal numbers).

Rochester, where I grew up, has a giant Sch- section of the phone book (I used to work in the library and did research in the Local History department)

Where we live now, the Finger Lakes, is very Dutch. So's Albany.

[msstacy13.livejournal.com]

Oh, another sort of related thing-
in the 1892 preface to The Hoosier School-Master,
Edward Eggleston mentioned that a specific dialect could be heard
anywhere Scots-Irish immigrants settled in the US;
even two or three generations later,
there were enclaves in South Carolina, Indiana, and Pennsylvania
where people spoke with the same accent as one another,
but unlike the accents other people around them.