h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Interesting things can be found when digging into family history archives.

The tricky bit with family trees is how fast they branch out and if you follow both maternal and paternal lines at every intersection you get to research a lot of people very fast.

Following the existing research done by my extended family, the furthest I could trace back is 1555. (14 generations - which is at least 16384 ancestors up to that point)

My Paternal family name translates as Miller (hailing back to before 1650). The actual mill was demolished in 1964, but the millstones and a paved footprint are still there to be seen on streetview.
My wife's known Paternal line goes about as far back (1655). Remains of the original family castle can still be found in a fortified farmhouse with moat that can nowadays be rented at extortionate prices.

Ooh, a fortified farmhouse! There's one of those in Georgia belonging to a (mercifully hopelessly distant) relation of mine. Of course, it only dates back to the 18th century. That's what I like about chasing genealogies - the people you learn about, as Sasha has here.

The 'accumulating ancestors' problem is something people from the southeast US, particularly the southern Appalachians, are acutely aware of. We suffer from what is officially called 'premature pedigree collapse'- we run out of ancestors and have to use them more than once.

That is impressive tracing back to 1555

My maternal grandfather's line managed to be traced back to 1690s, but quite a few of my ancestors had surnames Smith or Jones, so there were too many people with the same name to be able to tell which one was 'ours'. Interesting going back in time that far, but yes it would be very challenging to try to trace thousands of people.

In contrast, I was surprised by how little I knew about my great-grandparents, so it was good to learn more about comparatively recent history

The same name issue reminds me of my mother having three girls with exactly the same name in her class, so the teacher gave them numbers. They were nieces.

We owe obligatory registered surnames to Napoleon (1811), before that, mostly the upper class had them (to avoid confusion around inheritance). Other people were named after their occupation (which is fine as long as the job stays in te family), or where they lived (If the house had a name. Numbered houses were also introduced by Napoleon). For the rest, the old 'Jan Willem's son' structure was the norm into the seventeenth and eightteenth century. Surnames arose a bit earlier in the cities, because the risk of people having the same one was greater there.

And didn't some of the Dutch people protest by inventing silly surnames? Or was that only the Flemish?

We had this problem in Greece, where we'd get two kids in the same class with the same first and last name. They were first cousins. Since Greeks name them after the grandparents, this happens a fair amount.

One boy smirked, 'Haha, you can't tell us apart!'

I replied, 'It doesn't matter. You're both failing.'

The silly names thing appears to be myth. Most of those names were around before Napoleon. The typical example is 'Naaktgeboren' (born naked). This appears to be a disambiguation of the German 'Nachborn' meaning that a child was born shortly after the death of the father, so unable to get the family name.

What did happen differently between the Dutch and Flemish is that the Dutch (because Napoleon was a bit later) already had their first set of fixed spelling rules, meaning that there is a lot less variation on how certain names were written. Flemish names always seem a bit exaggerated to me, with lots of rogue c's and y's and words stuck together.

Aha! Thanks for that! I always wondered.

They wouldn't give family surnames to posthumous babies? That sounds a bit odd, to me.

Speaking of posthumous naming: Posthumus / Posthuma / Postema are also a common Dutch surnames... (about 20.000 in total)

Wow. That's a high mortality rate for expectant fathers.

I expect those are also the descendants of such people where the name just stuck after the initial incident. Across three centuries, it isn't as bad as it seems.

Names are certainly interesting to research. Like Bushyhead. There's a Bushyhead family. I think most of them live in Oklahoma and some of them have been prominent historical figures. They are descended from a man named John Stuart.

John Stuart was born in Scotland. In the 18th Century, he was an agent for the British Crown in what is now the southeast US. He was very popular among the Cherokees, who gave him the name Oonaduta (Bushyhead) because of his curly red hair. He and his Cherokee wife had several children.

In order to fit in with the new immigrant society, the Cherokee changed their naming habits from matrilineal to patrilineal - so instead of being named after their mamas, they were named after their papas. And there's a family named Bushyhead.