Share Your Interesting Surnames

[White Swan]

I found the odd ancestral surname Klebsattel. It means "glue to the saddle". Likely someone who hardly got off the horse.

Some emigrated to the US name bearers made Clapsaddle out of it. Barbarians!

Glue to the saddle, I like that. I wonder if the American so-called "clapsaddles" were involved with the cowboy history out here. Yes I'm an American barbarian too, but I just don't understand our people's consistent tossing away of their own identity. I mean I know it was prophecied so I guess that is the only real reasonable explaination for this rebellion that I can muster. I want our people back. And that is prophecied too, so I do have hope for my fellow barbarians.

[rothaer]

Another ancestral surname is Kagermann. An arbitrary German surname that noone would react on. But it turned out to be very rare. And after I could not understand the etymology I looked it up in a respective dictionary. It's said to be derived from the small village of Kagar (obviously a Slavic name) in northern Brandenburg.

https://www.google.de/maps/place/Kag....8262849?hl=de

So most likely someone coming from there. My ancestor (from abt. 1800) was in a little town just 15 km from there. So if you consider that the surnames emerged at abt. 1350 +/- 100 years, this lineage had just moved 15 km in half a millenium.

I once visited that very small village Kagar for curiosity and found out that it had been resettled in the 17th or 18th century after having been deserted for quite a while. As a Kagermann descendant I felt to have an older connection to Kagar than all of the current inhabitants. On the other hand my unknown ancestor far back that will have got the name Kagermann when he moved to somewhere else, will likely have contributed to the village getting deserted.

[White Swan]

Another ancestral surname is Kagermann. An arbitrary German surname that noone would react on. But it turned out to be very rare. And after I could not understand the etymology I looked it up in a respective dictionary. It's said to be derived from the small village of Kagar (obviously a Slavic name) in northern Brandenburg.

https://www.google.de/maps/place/Kag....8262849?hl=de

So most likely someone coming from there. My ancestor (from abt. 1800) was in a little town just 15 km from there. So if you consider that the surnames emerged at abt. 1350 +/- 100 years, this lineage had just moved 15 km in half a millenium.

I once visited that very small village Kagar for cusriosity and found out that it had been resettled in the 17th or 18th century after having been deserted for quite a while. As a Kagermann descendant I felt to have an older connection to Kagar than all of the current inhabitants. On the other hand my unknown ancestor far back that will have got the name Kagermann when he moved to somewhere else, will likely have contributed to the village getting deserted.

Wow it is cool that you could find the exact location by the nature of the name, what a blessing from your ancestors. Have you found what may have caused your patriarch to leave? Have you returned to visit?

[rothaer]

I do have some rural German ancestors from Central Poland. I could only trace them back till 1798, but this was still in Poland. So no actual knowledge from where in Germany proper they once came. I picked out surnames that are less common in a pan German context like Riewe, Kelm and Ziegenhagen and did put them in a surname distribution map from 1890 (attached).



I now also depicted the ethnic border between Germans and Poles with a red line in the map, so only left of this line their origin could be, right of that they can just be colonists. It looks pretty convincing that all three names concordantly hail from Southern Farther Pomerania (compare to other parts of Germany!).

[Victor]

Some maiden Non-Russian/Ukrainian surnames of grandmas and relatives from my maternal side:

Jumati, Crusevan - both Moldovan
Ipsilanti - Greek

Shevchenko - mother's maiden surname which is very trivial for Ukraine and often met even in Russia

[rothaer]

Wow it is cool that you could find the exact location by the nature of the name, what a blessing from your ancestors. Have you found what may have caused your patriarch to leave? Have you returned to visit?

Nope and nope.