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Position:Home>Genealogy> Any sites that tell you what country your surname came from?


Question:for free


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Many.
That does not make them valid or reliable. Names can come from more than one origin, and unless you do actual research, you might not be aware of any name changes in the history of your family. If they want to sell you a "history" of your name, be especially skeptical.

These are the two most reliable that you can access without a membership:

http://www.ellisisland.org
http://www.castlegarden.org

The only caveat to remember is that they will list the nationality of the person as it existed in the year of their emigration. But the map of Europe changed dramatically in the last 100 years. What was "Austria-Hungary" 100 years ago is broken into bits and pieces of more than 40 different countries today.

Be careful about sites like Swyrich.com, Houseofnames.com, etc. They have very few facts and a big interest in making your name fit into one of their profiles so that they can sell you things.

The other caveat is to remember that where a person's parents were born could be very different from where the children were born. People moved and took their names with them. If someone goes to a site and tells you that your family name was Frisian, it's possibly true. But if your family was living in Finland for 400 years, does that one generation of Frisians who chose that name mean as much as the 400 years when the family was in Finland? It's also just as likely that your Finnish ancestors changed the spelling a little bit to make the name easier for their new neighbors to understand. The "tweak" could have given them a name that "looks" Frisian....but it's very much Finnish-American. The UP of Michigan is full of real-life examples.

Ancestry.com is good for this, plus it's free to search. It will also give you details of what your surname means and variations of the name.

http://www.ancestry.com/learn/facts/defa...

Yeah, one website is www.houseofnames.com It gives you the origin(s) of the name, the history of the first people who came to America with it, the family crest given to the family, and famous people who have the surname.

www.houseofnames.com is a place to start