Anybody know the origin of the Family name Tajan?

Question:

Anybody know the origin of the Family name Tajan?

All I know is that it is pronounced as "Tah-han" and is of Spanish origin. When I did some searching online, the name was hard to trace back. I wanted to know what city did the name come from. I'm from the Philippines and I also have a Chinese herritage with a Chinese middle name "Yan" and I also searched that up but was hard because of the language differences.

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: It's got some pretty diverse roots. I've found it in Lebanon, Turkey, Italy, France and Spain.

Figuring out its Spanish origins won't be easy, but this is what I was able to find:

Jose Tajan emigrated from Spain in 1929. He was born in the town of Mures.

Ludovina Tajan left Spain in 1954. Her records are too recent to be on the internet, but she flew out of Madrid.

The largest number of people I could find with that surname were actually French. It's impossible to tell if the name started in Spain and went to France, started in France and went to Spain...or if it started in each of the countries independently of the others.

You'll need to search records in the Philippines to figure out when the name arrived in the country. Then see if you can find parish records to help identify the hometown in Spain. Spain has some of the strictest privacy laws in the world. You're not going to find their records on the internet, so there's no way of pinpointing the origins of the name in that country unless you use Catholic records in the Philippines to do it. http://www.familysearch.org/eng/search/f...

has a bunch of them. It is anyone's guess which branch you came from. There isn't much BMD data from the Philippines on the Internet. Not being able to read Chinese will be a huge barrier to you. I 'll bet your grandmother who was Chinese begged you to learn and you told her "later". There isn't much BMD data on Chinese people on the Internet either.

I'm sorry. Your best chance of tracing back 12 generations is to be born to English or New England parents, in families that lived next to solid, fire-proof stone churches for 12 generations and never dared to venture out of their county.

You might start with your grandparents' marriage certificate and work back the hard way, writing to churches to see if the Japanese left any records intact, or the priests hid them successfully.