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date: 15 November 2024

Native American Family Names 

Source:
Dictionary of American Family Names
Author(s):
Simon LenarčičSimon Lenarčič

The first edition of the Dictionary of American Family Names regretfully contained only a few entries for Native American surnames, i.e. surnames of the indigenous peoples of North America, and even those were mostly unexplained. Numbers of surnames in this second edition of the Dictionary (DAFN2) that are labeled as “Native American” or described as e.g. “common among Native Americans” are still not very large (exactly 300). This is for two reasons: the decimation of the Native American population from the 17th to the early 20th centuries from European epidemics and colonial atrocities, and the fact that many if not most—in some tribes, as for example in the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, even virtually all—Native Americans acquired English, French, Spanish, or in some cases German surnames in the 19th and the early 20th centuries. The enormous diversity of the native cultures has added to the low frequencies of individual surnames, such that few of them meet the selection criterion of 300 bearers in the 2010 census.... ...

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