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Position:Home>Genealogy> If your last name is spelled and pronounced the same way are you related to that


Question:Just thought about it.


Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: Just thought about it.

What a cute question!
My friend's surname was pronounced with the 2nd syllable silent; let's say it was: Ploughan. Her family pronounced it Plon. When her brother married, his wife decided to pronounce the name, Ploggan. Who knows why???

Names of those who emigrated from Europe to the USA, were often mis-spelled by Immigration Officials, Ship Manifests or by illiterate immigrants themselves. Translation problems/ignorance of the spoken language, lead to many and varied mispronunciations of surnames; so that many folks, related in the old country, found themselves with different surnames (especially if they settled in different areas)
Does that resonate?

uh... no. You think everyone named Brown or Smith in the world is related?

If you have a really unusual last name it could be.

My mother's maiden name is unusual even in Sweden, and my cousin did research and found that everyone with that last name came from one village in Sweden. I guess we are all distantly related if you go back far enough.

Not necessarily. When surnames were taken or assigned, legitimate sons of the same man could have wound up with a different surname but each shared their surname with others with whom they were not related. Changes in name spellings were fairly common as clerks wrote a name in what they felt was the phonetic way.
We might think it odd that all sons of the same man having a different surname or the same surname not being passed down through the generations, but in the past they would have thought our way today is strange.

You could easily be. The reason is, that, until the late 1800s people tended to spell phonetically. You're probably related to them anyway - sooner or later - as we all are. Here's some food for thought...

Did you know you have 1024 grandparents 10 generations ago? That's a lot of relatives in roughly 200 years.

How about 20 generations ago? You'll be staggered to realize that you have over 500,000 grandparents. Yep, it's true. And that's only circa 1600 AD...

And 30 generations ago - about 600 years ago, give or take a few - hardly the beginning of time... How many grandparents would you have? A little over 500 million. Sooner or later we have "repeaters" in there, meaning it's not a mental leap to see we really are our brother's keeper.

Sometimes. Most of the people named Cady in the USA descend from Nicholas Cady of Massachusetts.

Sometimes not. Robert E. Lee didn't have any Chinese cousins, but there are lots of Chinese people named Lee.