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German-American Names
| Article
# : |
16529 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1989 |
4,214 Words |
| Author
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George Fenwick Jones
A professor of history at the University of Maryland, George
Fenwick Jones is the author of the forthcoming book German-
American Names, to be published this year by the Genealogical
Publishing Company in Baltimore. |
The average American detects something foreign or ethnic about the names Ambrogioli, Angelopoulas, Chrzaszcy, Dobrovichev, or Espinosa, yet he sees nothing foreign in the names Buick, Chrysler, Packard, or Studebaker. Likewise, there is nothing especially foreign about Custer, Pershing, Hoover, or Eisenhower, or even about Nimitz and Kimmel. There are two reasons for this: First, the German language is closely related to English and, second, such names have been around long enough to be quite at home.
Most Americans with German names do not know what their names mean. Many do not even know that their names are of German origin. This is because most German-Americans, they are just Americans--the word German disappeared along with the hyphen in 1917, if not long before. Also, the United States is such a melting pot that not many old Americans are of solely German descent; the few who are can be found in small, isolated religious sects. A man named Schultz may be predominantly Irish, and a man named O'Leary may be predominantly German.
With the recent revival of interest in roots and ethnicity, many Americans with German names are becoming curious about the origin and meaning of their names. To satisfy their curiosity, German-Americans sometimes consult German dictionaries, not realizing that names often differ markedly from their current dictionary meaning. For example, Schaffner, Schirm, Rechner, and Flieger now mean "streetcar conductor," "umbrella," "computer," and "aviator." But when German surnames were adopted in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, there were no streetcars, umbrellas, computers, or airplanes, and the names meant instead "steward," "protection," "accountant," and "plowman" (from
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