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

I like to plug interesting and unusual online resources every now and again, and today’s one is definitely in the category of information you never thought you needed.

http://www.learn-german-language-online.com/german-surnames.html

It’s a site listing the derivation of common German surnames. Now, I’m sure we all know Herr Mueller was the miller, and Frau Schmidt’s ancestor was the blacksmith.

What I didn’t know was that Justin Bieber’s forebear was a busy beaver, or that Kohler was a charcoal-burner (I thought it was something to do with cabbages).

Anyway - file and forget

You're going to cause trouble here.

Johnny Depp is kind of well-named...

When J S Bach wrote one of his non-liturgical cantatas, he used a word joke by having the name "August Mueller" be a magic spell. This was funny because that name was as common in his time and place as "John Smith" might be in ours.

Or, rather, whoever wrote the libretto came up with the joke. I doubt that Bach wrote many of the librettos for his cantatas. he was too busy writing 16 pages of music [on average] every day.

[Amy P]

Didn't come across Depp...

Sad to see Daimler is a torturer. My dad had a Daimler once, the most beautiful car in the world.

"Sad to see Daimler is a torturer." [recumbentman]

A lot can happen to a family over the course of 40 or 50 generations. Modern day Daimler family members have only the tiniest bit of their ancestor's DNA in them.

I had a distant ancestor who was a captain in William the Conqueror's army. That has hardly anything to do with who I am or what I am like.

Plus, perhaps hundreds of millions of people are descended from William the Conqueror himself. I expect that nearly all H2G2's researchers are descended form him.

Nice to think of Johnny Dankworth as a protector of the mind, though.