Sun, 14 March 2010
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Cormac Mac Ruairi investigates the origins of family names like Kok, Pekelharing and Smallegange.
For the briefest of moments, I wondered if Mr. 'out of his pants' had a thing with Ms. 'jump in the field'. Tantalising! Well, you had to see them to appreciate the picture.
But alas, as quickly as the idea formed in my mind, it was beaten back by the words of my old Irish language teacher in Dublin. 'Foreigners don't have silly names. In fact, foreigners probably think your own name is silly.'
And boy, he made his point loud and clear. A classmate who had the temerity to find Mr O Hay's pronouncement amusing suddenly found himself the victim of a rather robust beating with a crutch (which belonged to a lad named O' Toole who had broken leg at the time).
The shock of the assault imprinted the teacher's words in my mind and consequently laughing at other people's names just isn't an option.
Where it all began
So, what's the story with Dutch surnames? The defining moment came on 18 August 1811 when Napoleon Boneparte - whose French army were occupying the Netherlands - signed a decree establishing a registry of births, deaths and marriages. Families, who until that time had got on just fine without a surname, were suddenly obliged to pick a surname.
It is a common misconception that the Dutch didn't take old 'boney-parts' all that seriously and set about picking silly names like Borst (breast) and Kok anticipating they could drop them as soon as 'nappy' got what was coming to him. It is an interesting theory but why didn't the Dutch follow through on this? Perhaps, after all, the Dutch took their new names seriously.
Genealogist Rick van der Wielen says that traditionally the Dutch used a patronymic system in which the father's first name became the first son's last name, and the other kids got the left over names from the grandfather, great grandfather and so on. Gradually in the 1600, people began to turn the patronymic name into modern surnames - Jan Hendricksen (Jan the son of Hendrick) gave his son the surname Hendricksen instead of Jansen. A suffix was often added to indicate "son of" or "daughter of". (Ex. Jan, son of Hendrick would be written Jan Hendricks, Jan Hendrickse or Jan Hendricksen.).
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