Friday, January 11, 2008

My Surnames

At the beginning of every meeting of the St. Louis Genealogical Society the attendees are asked, "Is there anybody here for the first time?" If there is they are asked to introduce themselves, and tell everyone the surnames they're researching. The latter makes a lot of sense at a local society since it's not completely unlikely you might run into a distant or not-so distant relative you were previously unaware of.

But it's also a small world, sometimes, and I don't think I've done that yet. I've introduced myself in several ways over the past few months, and mentioned surnames here and there in various posts, but I haven't created a single post that lists all my surnames. A complete surname list could get rather lengthy. But if I limit it to surnames of direct ancestors, it's more manageable.

There are several ways I could organize these names. I decided to alphabetize them, but group them by how many generations they are away from me.

Some may notice there are 17 names in the first list, when some might expect only 16. That's because there was a surname change. There are a couple surname changes in the earlier generations as well.

1-4 generations

ADLER, BLATT, BOKSERN, CANTKERT, CRUVANT, DENYER, DEUTSCH, DUDELSACK, FEINSTEIN , HARTLEY, LICHTMAN, MOJSABOVSKI, NEWMARK, PERLIK, STUART, VAN EVERY, WEISS

5-8 generations

BEASLEY, BLATYTA, COLEMAN, FRETZ , GOLDFINCH, GOLDSTEIN, HOLMES, HORTON, KIPERSZTOK, LIPMAN, LUCELLAS, OBERHOLTZER, ROSENBERGER, SHOWERS, SLIVER, SLUPSKY, SWAYZE, VAN IVEREN, WILCOX

9-12 generations

BETTS, BURGER, CHAMBERLAIN, FREDERICKSEN, HAYNE, KINGE, LANGTON, MEYER, SCHUYLER, WINES

I am going to link to this post from my sidebar, and I will update it as I have names to add (or change).

2 comments:

Charley "Apple" Grabowski said...

This is a great idea! I like the way you grouped them by the number of generations.

Colleen said...

Another idea you might try is listing your surnames on your sidebar. I did that with mine so that they are always there for people to browse through. I separated them by Maternal, Paternal and Collateral. I put mine at the end of the links so that the links would remain pretty prominent. Just a thought.