Question Home

Position:Home>Genealogy> Is that true the last name garcia,gutierrez are from jewish origin? are they sep


Question:Hi.. I am mexican and I have heard. someone told me garcia and gutierrez are jewish last names from spain.. they are sephardies.. help me out please..


Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: Hi.. I am mexican and I have heard. someone told me garcia and gutierrez are jewish last names from spain.. they are sephardies.. help me out please..

Garcia and Gutierrez are Spanish names. Garcia can be either a given name or a surname, and Gutierrez is a surname -- Spanish names ending in -ez are patronymics (Sanchez is the son of Sancho, Diaz is the son of Deigo, etc.). They are not necessarily Sephardic (remember that Spain expelled the last of the Jews in 1492). If you want to know if you have Jewish ancestry, DNA testing is more reliable that a surname.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:J...

I had never heard that before, but apparently it is correct, that link shows sephardic surnames and they are on there

Gutierrez is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mos...

of Germanic origin, so it might not be from the sephardic, but since so many jews were in Germany in the 19th-20th century, there could be a connection. I'm not an expert on Jewish history

Not true. The general rule of thumb is that Spanish names ending in -es (such as Peres instead of Perez) are Sephardic. But both Garcia and Gutierrez are Spanish names that could have been used by either Catholic, Moors or Jews. The changes in spelling came after they left Spain and went into lands that didn't have a comparable letter to "Z". That's where the "S" came as the alternate spelling.