What do you know about your surname?

Surnames can tell us quite a lot about the history of the surname and the surname’s origin. This element is also covered, to some degree in the Introduction of One-Name Studies course, ran by Pharos.

Anyone who has been reading this site for a while will know I have a real interest in surnames and have two surnames registered with the Guild of One-Name Studies

Those two surnames are rather large studies, one for the surname of Butcher, which is clearly an occupational surname. The other surname is Orlando and is Italian. This is a Patronymic surname, from the first name of Roland.

This map shows the distribution of the Orlando surname across Italy. The map comes from the site Gens.info

There are a number of my Italian surnames that I find rather curious and at some point in the coming weeks I might write about those. I have written about surnames a number of times over the last few months and you can read those posts HERE

You can the read the discussion at the Facebook Family Tree Academy group and on Twitter using the #FHWeek