September voting about surname topic for October showed you are interested in surnames which were derived from water. So let's take a look on such surnames - and see how many of those we have.
Water is voda in Czech and Wasser in German. I'll use both languages as both were used here in the Czech Republic in the past.
There is a very old blog post about how surnames were created. This blog post describes that sometimes the person received a surname which was funny because of his appearance or behaviour.
And there are surnames which were considered funny those days - and they still exist until today and still are funny. Here are some examples of such surnames - and I hope you'll have fun reading the explanation.
Last month poll decided that this month I'll write about those surnames which reffer to the physical appearance of the first person who got that surname. So - what kind of surnames we can find in this "category"?
Czech lands are a place where many different language elements meet - there si Czech language, but there were parts where German was the most common language till the half of the 20th century. How did this happen?
As you most probably know, one third of the Czech lands inhabitants were Germans till the second half of 1940s. This was caused by the large medieval colonisation when owners of Czech estates invited people from quite overcrowded Bavaria and other German speaking regions to come and settle in almost uninhabited regions of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia. As these people were living in quite secluded areas (such as mountain valleys) they kept their language and spoke German.
When I was researching my own family I processed all the records from the marriage book of Dobrš parish between 1702 and 1784. Thanks to that I got a long list of grooms and brides - and I decided to do a word map (or a word cloud) for both male and female surnames out of it to see what were the most common grooms' and brides' surnames in this parish in 18th century.
And I decided to provide these word maps also to you - maybe your ancestors were from this area and you'll find some not-so-usual surnames you know...
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March poll about surnames on Patreon was won by an option to show surname changes on one surname. I have chosen surname Švejda which provides number of different possibilities how to write it.
Surname Švejda is said to have two possible different origins - it could come from the word Švéd which means Swede or Swedish, or it could originate from a personal characteristic - švejda meant someone who was big and/or clumsy.
There are different ways how to write this surname which is caused by the different ways how to write down letters as explained in one of the older blog posts. Here is an overview of those changes:
