User-submitted Reference

Origin of Kuznetsov surname

A study of the history of the emergence of the Kuznetsov surname opens up forgotten pages of the life and culture of our ancestors and can tell a lot of curious about the distant past.

The surname Kuznetsova belongs to the old type of Russian surnames formed from a personal nickname.

The tradition of giving a person, in addition to the name received at baptism, an individual nickname from ancient times existed in Russia and persisted until the XVII century. This is due to the fact that in everyday life there were relatively few church names, which were therefore often repeated. The stock of nicknames was practically inexhaustible, which made it easy to distinguish a person from other carriers of the same name.

Nicknames in Russia were extremely diverse and often reflected some striking qualities of appearance, character or occupation of a person. Among the 'professional' naming is the old personal nickname Blacksmith. In ancient times, the blacksmith was the most necessary and noticeable person in the village. Many magic properties were attributed to blacksmiths working with fire - wealthy and important people, and naming on this basis was widespread. In ancient business acts, the Solvychegod posadsky man Ivan Panfilov Kuznets (1618), the peasants of the Vilegod volost of the Solvychegod uyezd Mitrofan Titov Kuznets (1557) and Fedor Kuzmin Kuznets (1597) and a lot of other people with similar names passing from generation to generation are mentioned.

In the XV – XVI centuries in Russia, first of all, among the noble and wealthy estates, the first Russian surnames began to appear as special, inherited family names. Already in the sixteenth century, the most common model of their formation was the addition of the suffixes -s / -ev or -in to the base, which over time became typical indicators of Russian surnames. Such surnames were possessive adjectives by their origin, and the name or nickname of the father most often became the basis of surnames. So the descendants of a man who bore the nickname Kuznets in ancient times, received the name Kuznetsov.

This surname arose very early and is recorded in archival documents dating back to the 15th century. In ancient times, it was worn by residents of various Russian lands: the Novgorod peasant Ortemko Kuznetsov (1495), the Moscow handyman Kuznetsov (1504), the peasant of Solvychegod district Job Ilyin Kuznetsov (1567), a certain Zamyatnya Pozdeev Kuznetsov (1607), the Yelets Cossacks Terekh and Kuznetsovs (1615), Moscow merchant Leonty Kuznetsov (1699), Sevsky gunner Petrushka Kuznetsov (1659) and others.

Today the surname Kuznetsov is one of the most frequent in Russia. So, in Moscow in 1964 there were 78 thousand Kuznetsovs, only the Ivanovs were more common (there were 90 thousand of them). And in the vast strip south and east of Moscow - from the Upper Oka to the Middle Volga, that is, in Tula, Gorky, Penza, Ulyanovsk - the Kuznetsovs were most common.

Kuznetsova is a Russian surname, meaning 'blacksmith'.

(Russian) The worker in metals; a smith.