Don’t forget Wainwright and Cartwright?
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I have no idea what my surname means or even where it comes from. Now, given I have more access than the average person to etymologic scholarship and even the occasional name researcher I could ask, one shouldn’t think that’s possible, but it’s a complete mystery.
I have a hunch it’s originally Slavic (because the paternal part of my family was pushed west by the war from these regions) but everyone who knows these languages that I ask can’t come up with a hypothesis either.
This is its distribution according to the map @teknocholer posted (cropping off the new world because that’s irrelevant in this context. There’s always a few there).
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Now I want to know what your surname is.
The works of Hans Bahlow are usually the go-to for German, but Adolf Socin’s Mittelhochdeutsches Namenbuch can give useful insights too.
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Yeah, it’s a shame I can’t doxx myself. But as I said, I have talked to professional name researchers and they don’t know either. One of the advantages of being an archaeologist is having access to such resources.
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Mine is one of those (I think boring) incidents of being ‘son of’ some guy named that thing at some point and from then on we’ll all just use that as a last name. Then again, this ties right in with my family’s love of naming it’s children after their fathers and ancestors. I’m a Jr. and my dad’s first and middle name are both names of relatives. Meanwhile my grandfather, uncle and cousin all share the same name. Several other relatives are named John. It’s a whole thing. The Johns are kinda fun for how they’re differentiated in nickname, one is Big John, then there’s Little John, another is John-John, etc.
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“No-as-big-as-medium-Jock-but-bigger-than-wee-Jock Jock”
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An acquaintance with an interest in genealogy had the same problem trying to track his wife’s family surname, a Hungarian name starting with A. He just hit a blank wall until he thought to ask his wife’s father. It turns out that the father’s original surname started with Y or Z or something like that. In university the father, tired of being called last for everything, simply chose a new name higher up the alphabet and started using it.
He later had two daughters, emigrated to Canada, had a distinguished career as a fairly famous mathematician, and is now buried, all under his randomly-chosen name. 
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Considering our Scots/English heritage, this is entirely accurate.
Mine seems to be trade-associated:
English (southwest): occupational name for a roofer (tiler or thatcher), from an agent derivative of Middle English hele(n) ‘to cover’ (Old English helian). French: from the personal name Hillier (see Hillary).
I live in the Southwest of England, and there was someone with the same name as me in the year below me at school.
I’ve read elsewhere that it’s Anglo-Saxon, but with the same derivation, ie a roofer.
Thankfully it’s not Thatcher!
Those with knowledge of British politics will know why I say that…
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My mam used to live in a place called Tow Law, which is ‘hill hill’. And they weren’t wrong.
My surname means ‘bottler of wine’.
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I assume your first name is Bryn, and we can refer to you as Hill of Hill Hill.
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Was catching up on videos posted on BB, and this story contains an example of how some African-Americans discover the history behind their surnames. The entire piece is worth watching, however, this link goes directly to the part about names:
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Global incidence: 28
Density: Yemen
Guess I really am special!
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Any chance your surname has Jewish heritage?
I assume you’ve already worked through Bohemian German possibilities.
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That’s incredibly rare. How many are relatives?
One of my family names showed concentrations in Bangladesh and the Middle East. It’s hard to imagine how that could be possible. I think it may be a case of “sounds like” when transliterated into the western alphabet.
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Maybe half, that I know of.
I assume the same. I have cousins in Tunisia and my haplogroup was originally Syrian, but that’s not the surname side of the family, and there’s no connection with Yemen that I know of for any of my family lines.
And I know my surname was Ellis-Islanded.
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That is an avenue I had indeed not pursued yet. Thanks for the tip.
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So, if you made bread, your last name would be Baker, and if you built houses, your last name would be Carpenter.
What did John Hancock do?
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In a similar way, my family name comes from the farmhouse my great-grandfather lived on; he was the younger son, so they split the family estate, giving him the smaller part, and he took his name from it. Like in Norway, this seems to have been pretty common in western Finland, where people generally went with the name of the farm or thorp they lived on. Fixed family names really became a thing for most people in the late 19th century; before that, it was mostly the nobles, the clergy and the soldiers who had family names.
(In eastern Finland, where for various reasons people moved around a lot more, family names became established long ago, and had gendered forms; a man might have been Kuivalainen, while a woman of the same family would have been Kuivalatar.)
Anyway, the etymology of my family name is a bit unceartain, but probably refers to one of the stages of slash-and-burn agriculture, where you take a plot of forest, fell the trees, burn them where they lay, and plant grain, or turnips, or whatever in the newly cleared field fertilized by the ashes.
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My grandmother has a seriously rare maiden name without any immediately obvious meaning. In her case that was the result of a rather brutally germanized Polish name. It isn’t a translation. It is based on the sound, but only very loosely inspired by it. In the end it is a perfectly plausible looking German word without any hint of anything Polish about it - except it is just gibberish. Once you know the reasonably common original name it all makes sense, but it would be really easy to miss. And yes, we have traced it to a specific late-19th century person who made the switch.
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