About Name Reference
As of 9 September 2019, there are 172,403 individual descriptions listed on name pages, many listing meaning. Descriptions are found in three forms:
- entries extracted from out-of-copyright and licensed works (forming the majority)
- dictionary-style definitions: extracted from various sources, which are cited in the footnotes section of the surname page
- user-submitted content: entries submitted by third parties with unverified credentials
Accuracy
The accuracy of almost all descriptions on the website have not been checked, as validating the accuracy of one definition can take eight or more hours. Even if one could be verified per hour, it would take more than sixteen years to verify all entries listed on the site as of 12 December 2015 and around $600 million (US) to research all surnames.
It should be noted that the study names (onomastics), as with linguistics in general, is not an exact science. The origins of many names, including surnames, have been lost. Many European surnames were adopted hundreds of years ago in culturally different times, with significantly different languages, low levels of literacy and a limited number of written records. Further, some European surnames are derived from given names that are several thousands of years old; and the meaning of some of these names can at best be guessed at by experts.
Although the meaning of some European surnames, particularly surnames that are derived from the name of a male (who is typically an ancestor), can be easily deciphered, others can be obscured to the point where the source language(s) are not even obvious. In such cases, which are common, an expert can give insights based on their knowledge of language and study of surnames. In many cases the actual origin, which is lost, will be offered by an expert, but the evidence to prove it does exist or can not be easily located.
Corruption, or changes in pervasive spelling, is one of the primary difficulties in tracing the origin of a surname. This is particularly true for immigrants, who may have invented a surname, or borrowed one which their family has no connection to. Another common difficulty is when a surname was taken from the name of a building or settlement that has long since disappeared and may not be recorded in any surviving document. One of the most difficult classes of surnames to decipher are those based on nicknames, as they can be derived from unusual circumstances, just as they can be today. As an example, I know someone who has the nickname 'Duffy', on account of sharing a given name with actor, Patrick Duffy. If this person had lived in an era when surnames were being adopted, there is a good chance they would have adopted or been given the surname, Duffy. Any attempt to decipher the meaning of the surname 800 years later will be hopeless. Surnames derived from obscure nicknames have probably been wrongly interpreted and that interpretation disseminated.
Similar sounding surnames can become confused, e.g. the surname, Partridge, which has been rendered as Partrich, could very easily have ended up as Patrick. When such a change did occur, its almost certain there would be no surviving record of it. This phenomena, which has clearly been demonstrated by DNA tests that show relationships between people who share the same paternal lineage, was made all the more likely due to limited literacy, people moving between areas with different dialects and the general shift in language if not outright replacement by another language.
It is also possible for one surname to have more than one meaning derived from the same language or occurring in the same country. Thus, just because a meaning for a surname has been well established, it does not mean that there may not be alternate origins.
The nature of the study of surnames is also in its infancy. In Britain their general study began around the middle of the 19th century, but there has been little growth in the field, owing to the fact that the research of surnames is not commercially viable and has only recently garnered academic funding. As such, most of the works published on surnames have been personal hobbies and often life-works. Some surnames can take eight hours or more to research and reliably document an origin. This means that a disciplined, full-time study of surname meanings could not hope to cover more than several-hundred surnames per year.
As such, Forebears makes no guarantee of the validity of any of the descriptions of surnames occurring on the website. If you want to get the best idea of your surname's origins, you need to throughly research your own paternal ancestry, throughly research the earliest occurrences of the surname to the present day and take a Y-DNA test. These tasks have already been undertaken by individuals bearing several hundred surnames. Many are members of The Guild of One-Name Studies. This website should be your first point of call for the most authoritative research on surnames.
User Submissions
In November 2015, Forebears added a facility for the submission of details on surnames by website visitors. As noted in this article, it is not possible for Forebears to vet the accuracy of these submissions and as such they should be regarded with the same skepticism as you would with any other source.
The facility was added as it represented the only feasible avenue to increase the number of surnames with a description. It also offers a place for people to publish details on surnames that will be beyond the reach of onomasticians. For example, there have been submissions of surnames adopted by Jews during World War II, surnames adopted by natives during colonisation and others that could only be preserved by word-of-mouth.
FAQs
There is a facility which allows you to submit details yourself. On each page there is a button 'Submit Information on This Surname...' either located at the top of the page or below the list of nations and territories a name occurs in. This will guide you though the submission process.
Only submissions that cover a surname's meaning, origin or arrival in another country are accepted. Submissions that only contain details about a family or a location the name occurs in are not accepted.
Information received on names via the contact form are added to a list that is periodically added to the site. However, these submissions are not eligible for the DNA test prize that is selected for every 1,000 submissions.
Accurately researching the origin and meaning of a surname can be a lengthy task, which can take more than one day. For this reason Forebears does not offer help in researching surnames. The most likely place you may receive help finding the meaning of a surname is on a genealogy forum covering the relevant county or language.
Forebears does not have the resources available to catalogue names, research their meaning or investigate the validity of surname descriptions. Descriptions of surnames listed on the site are almost wholly from third parties and are provided as is; as a point of reference. This is disclaimed at the bottom of each page:
“Descriptions are largely reproduced from 3rd party sources; diligence is advised on accepting their validity”
The focus of the site is to provide distribution data and third party descriptions of names.
If a description is brought to light which is highly questionable, it will be given a tag to note that or deleted. Concise documentation is required for this.
You can however add your own information and dispute other descriptions by submitting it via the surname page. That can be done by clicking on the button the says “Submit Information on This Surname for a Chance to Win a $100 Genealogy DNA Test”. This either either located at the top of the page or above the meaning section.
As of September 2018, there are 26,445,869 surnames listed on Forebears. Assuming that each surname has five spelling variants, that gives a total of 5,289,174 'unique' surnames, which may have more than one origin.
To provide a somewhat thorough investigation of each group, plus checking, would require 8 hours per 'unique' surname; or a requirement for 42,313,392 hours of research, or 22,897 years of 9 to 5 work. With a team of 500 researchers, it would take around 46 years to research all surnames.
As there are few people qualified to undertake such research, most of the researchers would require training.
Applying a roughly average salary per hour, $25 (US), would require a salary budget of $1,057,834,800. This can roughly be compared to the GDP of The Gambia, the cost of two space shuttle launches, or the cost of two major sports teams.
On top of wages, add $30 million for office space; $10 million for various utilities; $12 million in training costs and millions in filling gaps in the corpus of linguistics literature, anthropological expeditions, transcribing historic documents and so on.
In all it could require around $1.1 billion. Even if you wanted to scale back the scope or reduce the quality, the costs will still be enormous.
- Some data sources used to produce the name statistics contain both a Latin and non-Latin rendering of a name. In these cases the Latin rendering was used, as is
- Latin and non-Latin data was used for a number of countries
- In the case that a standardised transliteration method was used, non-Latin forms were consistently transliterated to the same Latin rendering