0
What are the origin of your family surnames?
Don't feel pressured to share the surnames if you think it compromises your privacy. I am only sharing the ones that will not immediately compromise my family's privacy of course.
My own last name has variations throughout south-central Italy; mine is the Sicilian version but there are versions of it in Calabria, and throughout other parts of Italy with various suffixes corresponding to region. It's probably in some way or another of Latin root.
My paternal grandfather's mother's surname is Lipari, which is a place name in Messina. Lipari in Sicily was named Lypàra by ancient poet Callimachus, and today you find men with the surname Liparis and women with the corresponding spelling, Lipari, in Greece (final S gets dropped for women).
My great grandmother on my paternal grandmother's side, hers was Costanzo, which has variations in southern Italy (Constanza being the other common one) and in Greece (Constantinou, Constantinopoulos, etc.) so what it might have been before, we'll never know. It's a common root in Italian and Balkan languages, you even see people in the Balkan Slavic countries with surnames like Konstantinov.
On my Portuguese side you have all of the typical Portuguese and Cape Verdean surnames -- Marques, Tavares, Teixeira, Gomes, etc. Most of these are also common in Brazil as well, and have a uniform distribution throughout Portugal.
On my Polish side, many of the surnames have been Anglicized in one way or another, but not all.
Bookmarks