Name consulting

We often carry our family name for a lifetime. They are a very familiar part of us and only rarely do we realize that there is a story behind this name.

It is the story of an ancestor who - hundreds of years ago - was given an epithet that was added to his surname. In this time of mononymy, everyone initially only had one surname. Only when the village became too large or too many inhabitants with the same name lived there did the people come up with something: Whether it was the occupation, the place of residence, the father's name, external characteristics such as a broad nose or a cheerful temperament, or the place of origin in the case of immigrants, some characteristic of the person named could be used to coin an epithet that served to make them more easily identifiable.

So today we are called Bittner ('the Büttner, Faßbinder'), Bruch ('the one who lives in/on the swamp'), Deimel ('son of Dietmar'), Finke ('the one who is as cheerful as a finch') or Harbeke ('the one from Harbeck') and thus carry a piece of history in our name that can be discovered with a little name study and linguistic history.