The Family Tree
By Terence L. Day
Terence L. Day, genealogist and journalist, is on the Washington State University faculty. He welcomes e-mail at genealogy@moscow.com, or regular mail in care of the Tri-City Herald City newsroom, P.O. Box 2608, Tri-Cities, WA 99302-2608.
Surnames draw meaning from lives in Middle Ages
This column was published June 23, 1996
One day several months ago, we were visiting in our living room with Ed and Cherry Wolf of Hillsboro, Ore., when we heard our daughter Elisabeth and her then 3-year-old son Aaron come onto the porch.
As they were about to enter the house, Aaron suddenly stopped and asked, "There aren't any wolves in there, are there?" He recently had been traumatized by the Big Bad Wolf in Little Red Riding Hood.
"No, there aren't any wolves in Opa and Grandma's house," Beth assured, and Aaron came bounding into the living room. After a brief visit, Beth and Aaron prepared to leave.
"Say goodbye to Grandma," Beth said.
"Goodbye, Grandma," Aaron said with a cuteness that can be fully appreciated by parents and grandparents.
"Say goodbye to Opa."
"Goodbye, Opa," Aaron said with a firmly applied "five" slap across the palm.
Then, in all innocence, Beth said: "Say goodbye to the Wolfs."
Poor Aaron froze, a look of horror on his face.
Quickly, we all assured him he was safe.
"These are Aunt Monika's parents," Beth explained. "Their name is Wolf, but they're not wolves. They're our friends."
With that assurance, Aaron quickly recovered and said, "Goodbye, The Wolf," and gave Ed an enthusiastic "five," wheeled and rushed for the door.
There was, however, a closer con nection between our visitors and wolves than we cared to explain to little Aaron. Chances are anciently, the Wolfs had some association with wolves, if only a belief in lycanthropy, the Middle Age notion men could be transformed into wolves.
Elsdon Smith, author of American Surnames, explains most Wolfs in the United States derive their name from Old Germanic given names that contain some element of wolf.
In medieval times, wolves were one of the most highly revered, and feared, of all animals.
The name Wolf helps illustrate the difficulty of surnames. Often, very different looking and sounding names have a common meaning or origin. For example, the English name Lowell is derived from the Old French word, "lou," meaning "wolf."
Sometimes, the same name is spelled differently. Wolfe, Wolff, Wolk, Woolf, and Wulf are but different German spellings of Wolf. The Poles spell it Walk, Wilk, and Wilczak. Lupo and Lupino are Ital ian; Volkov is Russian; Vovcenko is Ukrainian; Farkas, Hungarian; Lycos, Greek, and Vlk, Czechoslovakian.
A Wolf by any other name is a Wolf the same.
Except for Romans during a period of the Roman Empire, humans didn't have surnames, or family names, until relatively recently. Surnames, as we know them, evolved during the Middle Ages. They draw their meanings from the lives of men in the Middle Ages.
These meanings often aren't obvious to us today because the meanings of words change while the meaning of particular surnames does not. We must understand them by the meaning ascribed to the word at the time the surname was adopted.
Onomastics is the name given to the study of names. Most authorities on the subject divide family names into four categories:
Patronymics (from the father's name, or other relationships).
Occupational names.
Nicknames.
Place names, or geographic names.
Day, Dey, Degman and Wickman are occupational names. They indicate a servant who worked in a dairy. They might be a caretaker of cows or a maker of cheese or butter. The same word also mean a kneader of bread. In earliest times, the dey was a female servant, but by the 14th century, the term was applied to men who followed these occupations.
This would be a fortuitous origin for my son, Nathan, who will graduate from Washington State University next year with a degree in food science and embark on a career as a cheese maker.
Of course, we have no idea whether we descend from cow keepers, cheese makers or bread kneaders, for the name also could derive from at least two other sources - one geographical and the other a nickname.
Some of the people who lived along the rivers Dee - there's one in Ireland and one that originates in Scotland and flows into England - took the surname Dee. Some authorities say it is but another form of Day.
Finally, Smith says Day also can come from Dai, a nickname for the Welsh Dafyddd, or Day, a nickname for the English David.
If you would like to know more about the origin of surnames in your family, you might want to get Smith's book the library. If they don't have it, tell the librarian it was published by Chilton Book Co. in 1969 and republished in 1994 by Genealogical Publishing Co., Baltimore. I'm sure they'll be able to find it. It is a classic.
Copyright 1996 Tri-City Herald. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.