Does your last name tell what your nationality is??

Question:My last name is Davis, does that mean I had ancestors from England?? Since the orgin is from England??

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: My last name is Davis, does that mean I had ancestors from England?? Since the orgin is from England??

Not necessarily. Some people used to take on the last time of the person they worked for. Others just changed their last names to fit into society better.

My great-great-grandfather's last name was Bourgeois, which is French... however, in the early 1900s, he changed it to Burgess to sound more English because the French at the time were very disliked.

My last name is Americanized Polish, but that leaves out my English, French, French-Canadian, German, Dutch, Cherokee and Swedish ancestors.

Your best bet is to start tracing your ancestors back and see if you can find out when they came into the country and where. Generally when coming into the country, they did have to report what country they originated from. This information is out there, generally.

Depends....it tells you the names history, but not necessarily yours. Consider the number of African Americans who bear names that were forced on them.

Rahman... ancestors from Bangladesh, Malaysia and India. Also an Islamic name so ancestors from other Islamic places maybe. However, this wasn't my dads name. My dad changed it when he got married to Rahman instead of keeping Islam x

Your last name may say nothing about you. Names were changed when people came to the US willy nilly to Americanize them.

Not necessarily, IF you traced your Davis line all the way back to England, then yes. The only true way to find your ancestry is to research YOUR specific family lines. Names change all the time, but "blood lines" don't!

It could be. For example, normally Italian last names end in a vowel. Mine ends in a "o". It just depends.

Sometimes, maybe. To take an extreme case, there are a lot of Chinese people whose surname is "Lee" who have no relation to Robert E. Lee, the confederate general.

"Davis" means "Son of David", and people have been naming children "David" ever since the Jewish one killed Goliath. "Davis" could have been something else in Greek, Hungarian, German or French that meant "Son of David" and your immigrant ancestor changed it to "Davis" so people would at least be able to spell it. Or, your grandfather's family may have been English from the time of the Norman Conquest, hunting foxes, wearing tweeds and saying "Cheerio, old boy".

The only way to find out who your ancestors are is to trace your family tree.

No. Your NATIONALITY is that of whatever country you were born and raised in, regardless of your ETHNICITY or HERITAGE.

If your parents are 100% Italian, but they move to Canada before you were born; and then you were born and raised in Canada, then your NATIONALITY is that you are Canadian. But, your heritage and ethnicity is Italian. Your last name says absolutely nothing about where you came from. Many last names have a multitude of origins; and there are many reasons why people end up with the last name they have, and those reasons may have nothing to do with the origins of their name.

In your case,possibly.But,even then,it's not always a slam dunk.Names heve been(and still are no doubt)Anglicanized to sound less"ethnic" and more common.To this end,there have been some hilarious examples of the "leave well enough alone variety.For example,in"The Stepford Wives" one of the charcters explains that her name"Marco" is really "Markowitz" her husbands real name,meaning that instead of "trading up" so to speak,he just substituted one undesirable ethnic group for another

There is a complex answer to your question. The answer is : YES, . . . SOMETIMES.

Remember, your last name is only half of your genealogy. Your mother and her parents and four great grandparents, and eight great, great grandparents and so forth are only part of the nationality of a single individual.

Davis might be English; but it is a derivation of David, which might be from dozens of other ethnic groups and nations.

For example, there is the very famous French painter, David, Jacques-Louis (1748-1825). French painter, one of the central figures of Neoclassicism. After the fall of Napoleon, David moved to Brussels, Belgium.

David is one of the most common names (both first and last names, in Wales.

David/Davis/Davies: was the patron saint of Wales, and the name was popular throughout early Britain...as a result, there a many surnames derived from the given name David, including Davis, and Davies as the Welsh equivalent.

Davies: English Patronymic name derived as a diminutive form of the given name David.

David, and its derivations, is one of the most common Jewish names, relating to King David, so there are many Davids from various nations.

It all depends on what your last name is and how long your father's family has been in the United States. My last name is a French last name which tells me that my dad was at least part French but his family came to the United States in 1740 so a lot of other nationalities have been added to the mix. My mother's last name was an Irish last name and both of her parents immigrated to the United States from Ireland. So, on my mother's side I can say that I'm half Irish. On my dad's side I'm a mutt.

maiden is trotter its english we are from england

Absolutely, totally NOT.
The last name I had while in school, was that of my stepfather, who was Chinese and Norwegian. My mother's ancestors were from Poland. Both of them (and myself) were born in the US, so their NATIONALITY was/is American. Where their ancestors came from, is a completely different topic.
Nationality has to do with citizenship of a country.
If you happen to be African American... the odds are very high that your family name was adopted following the Civil War, sometimes (not always) from the family of former ownership. A difficult statement, but a matter of historical fact. Unless they were of mixed ancestry, there are no ancestors from England (or France, whatever the heritage of the name might have been).
Genealogy has to do with factually tracing where your ancestors came from... last names actually can be a very minor part of that.

Davis has also been used as a shortened version of Davisson. (Scandinavian)

It doesn't really mean that people change surnames all the time and it was very common for immigrant's to change their names when arriving in a new country

No, My last name is definitely English but I am Tohono O'Odham. (Native American Tribe)

Well, my surname is Irish, but I'm English. So my surname history and my nationalality don't match up.

So somewhere along the line, they came over! Haven't found it yet though.

Nope, it only tells you how your name was spelled on your own birth certificate. Imagine all those hundreds of thousands of immigrants through the last 200 years who "Americanized" or "Canadianized" their surnames so that they didn't sound foreign. They could do a natural "cutting off" of extra letters at the end, so that Kowalczyk became Kowal. But they might have gone for something that wiped out all traces of ethnicity, like Kowalczyk becoming Wall or Smith (Kowalczyk translates to Smith from Polish). They might have picked a name that sounded much better. Senator John Kerry sure sounds like a good Irish Catholic boy from Boston, but his paternal grandfather was a Jew from Czechoslovakia named Kohn who picked a name that was common in his new adopted city.

Your nationality is determined by the country to which you owe allegiance. Who would issue a passport to you today? That's the country of your nationality. Your ethnicity is determined by where your ancestors hailed...but even that's misleading. There are thousands of Lebanese immigrants who went to Mexico and married the children of French immigrants who married local Mexicans. When their children came to the US from Mexico, they were really French, Lebanese...maybe a little Syrian or Palestinian...and Mexican. Who knows what happened to all the names in the multiple translations.

The more experience you get with genealogy, the less you look at surnames and spellings to differentiate people and the more you look at the paper trail and figure out all the changes made from one generation to the next.

davis is english or welch in origin. it means son of david. a lot of names were based on the job you did. a brewer was a beer maker. a smith was a blacksmith etc... Most black people in the U.S. are biracial. Studies have shown that 90% are.

Let's see:

My last name is Smith; then again, there's also
Schmid, Schmidt,
Schmitt,
Schmitz,
Schmied
Schmieder
Skmiton
De Smid
De Smedt,
Smid,
Smitas,
Szmidt
Not to mention,
Faber
Farrier
Gowan
Kowal
Kowalski
Kovac
Herrera--all of which translate into English as Smith.

There's Anna Nicole Smith (an assumed name), Emmitt Smith, Jaclyn Smith, Kate Smith ("God Bless America"), Soapy Smith, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

My last name is Smith--does that mean I had ancestors from America? Yes, and almost every place else. That covers nationality. Ethnicity is another matter. I can trace my surname back only to my great-great grandfather (Alden Smith--born in Massachusetts in 1801).